Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection

- Helen MacDonald,
(Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2005.)

Publication Date: March 2005
Price: $34.95
Status: Available
Format: 240pp, PB C-format, 235 x 154 mm, 25 b&w pictures throughout
Subject : History/Medicine
ISBN: 0-522-85157-6

What should happen to the dead? Bone collecting, body snatching and the politics of the trade in human remains is a gothic tale that still haunts contemporary life.

Human Remains tells the scandalous story of how medical men obtained the corpses upon which they worked before anatomy was regulated in Australia and Britain. Moving back and forth between Britain and the island penal colony of Tasmania, the book examines an era when convicted murderers received the double sentence of both death and dissection, the poor who died in hospital were routinely turned over to the surgeons for study, and men traded in human remains, including those of Aboriginal people.

Human Remains argues that we cannot hope to understand unlawful twenty-first century uses of the dead without learning about the roots of this behaviour, which lie in the nineteenth-century dissecting rooms where much of medicine's great cultural authority was forged.

'In this intriguing social history, Helen MacDonald resurrects dehumanised, dissected bodies ... the sensational side of the story involves grave robbing, murder for body parts and body snatching from hospitals. But ... this is the backdrop to, not the focus of, her nuanced and subtle inquiry into the politics and morality of the dissecting room' (Fiona Capp, Age, 2 April 2005).

'This book ... is compellingly readable ... MacDonald forensically dissects historical records to depict for the first time what occurred in the name of medicine and science in comparative colonial isolation ... Human Remains offers a timely assessment of the present debate on human remains ... [and is] a necessary and immeasurably important book' (Christopher Bantick, Weekend Australian, 21-22 May 2005).