History/Medicine
Book Details

Human Remains

Episodes in Human Dissection

Helen MacDonald

Human Remains is a history of human dissection by the medical profession in the nineteenth century.

Awards

Winner: Victorian Premier's Literary Award for a First Book of History, 2006
Shortlisted for the 2006 Ernest Scott prize: The prize, which is awarded annually, is for a 'distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand'.

Opinion

'Human Remains sparks and scorns and spins you around … MacDonald is that rare and precious commodity: a crack historian with a taste for the bizarre'
(Mary Roach, New York Times Review of Books, 17 September 2006).

'This intriguing history is a nuanced and subtle inquiry into the politics and morality of the dissecting room'
(Fiona Capp, Age, 2 April 2005).

'A set of interwoven stories about how concrete, fleshed out individuals came to be subjects for dissection. Fresh, daring, and appealingly provocative'
(John Harley Warner, Yale University).

'This book is compellingly readable … A necessary and immeasurably important book' (Christopher Bantick, Weekend Australian, 21-22 May 2005).

What the judges of the Ernest Scott Prize said, in choosing Human Remains for the shortlist:

'Focussing on individual cases of dissection in England and Van Diemen's Land, as well as containing contextual chapters on the practice of nineteenth-century anatomy and the collection of the skeletal remains of Tasmanian Aborigines, this study provides a series of wonderful insights into the role of nineteenth-century anatomy in shaping and reflecting the attitudes of doctors and scientists towards death and dead bodies, progress and evolution, and the cultures of Indigenous peoples. It constitutes a creative and imaginative recreation of the European and antipodean pre-industrial world' (shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize in History, July 2006).

About this Title

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.

About the Author

Helen MacDonald is an award-winning historian and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. She is currently investigating how anatomy came to be regulated in the Australian colonies, and exploring the links between medical and non-medical uses of the dead from the nineteenth century to the present.

www.helenmacdonald.com.au

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978-0-522-85157-1