MACMILLAN Corpses in Belgian Anatomy, 1860–1914: Nobody’s Dead (Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History)

This book tells the story of the thousands of corpses that ended up in the hands of anatomists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Composed as a travel story from the point of view of the cadaver, this study offers a full-blown cultural history of death and dissection, with insights that easily go beyond the history of anatomy and the specific case of Belgium. From acquisition to disposal, the trajectories of the corpse changed under the influence of social policies, ideological tensions, religious sensitivities, cultures of death and broader changes in the field of medical ethics. Anatomists increasingly had to reconcile their ways with the diverse meanings that the dead body held. To a certain extent, as this book argues, they started to treat the corpse as subject rather than object. Interweaving broad historical evolutions with detailed case studies, this book offers unique insights into a field dominated by Anglo-American perspectives, evaluating the similarities and differences within other European contexts. Review “Tinne Claes has written a wonderful study on anatomy in fin-de-siècle Belgium. This book is certainly greater than its parts and will provide intellectual sustenance and great pleasure to all those who read it. … What Claes has produced is a fascinating, thought-provoking and extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of the modernist society in the Western World which forms the basis for most current debates about what it is to be a social human.” (Ross L. Jones, Metascience, Vol. 30, 2021) Review “In this fine book Tinne Claes takes the history of anatomy out of the nineteenth century and into our own times. She shows that, to understand the hitherto little studied transition from body snatching and the shame of dissection to voluntary donation in the service of science, we must follow both anatomists and prospective cadavers as they move through the physically and socio-politically transforming city: from hospital beds and dissection halls to political arenas and burial grounds.” (Tatjana Buklijas, University of Auckland, New Zealand ) “The coercive laws and secret arrangements through which nineteenth-century anatomists obtained the corpses of the poor are better known than how anatomical donation became the norm in the twentieth century. This ground-breaking book argues that democratic politics and egalitarian attitudes – from the rise of consent in clinics to less punitive approaches to poverty – forced change on anatomy around 1900. By reconstructing anatomists’ post-mortem practices and the stories of those they dissected, Tinne Claes offers a compelling account of how nobodies began to become somebodies.” (Nick Hopwood, author of Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (2015)) From the Back Cover This book tells the story of the thousands of corpses that ended up in the hands of anatomists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Composed as a travel story from the point of view of the cadaver, this study offers a full-blown cultural history of death and dissection, with insights that easily go beyond the history of anatomy and the specific case of Belgium. From acquisition to disposal, the trajectories of the corpse changed under the influence of social policies, ideological tensions, religious sensitivities, cultures of death and broader changes in the field of medical ethics. Anatomists increasingly had to reconcile their ways with the diverse meanings that the dead body held. To a certain extent, as this book argues, they started to treat the corpse as subject rather than object. Interweaving broad historical evolutions with detailed case studies, this book offers unique insights into a field dominated by Anglo-American perspectives, evaluating the similarities and differences within other European contexts. About the Author Tinne Claes is a Postdoct