Introductory description

Human remains have a unique material history given their dual nature as both people and objects. Since antiquity, the remains of famous and infamous individuals have been preserved as emblems of their corporeal existence around the world. But in the modern era, those of less prominent individuals have also been used in teaching and research, identified as exemplars of disease or sources of corruption, mounted as trophies, used to solve crimes, and transplanted to save lives. As a result, tens of thousands of human remains have passed through medical schools, museums, and laboratories, and have been kept far from their intended resting places.

This 15-CAT module particularly focuses on the medical uses of human remains, charting the instrumentalization of body parts since 1800 and the historical legacies this process has incurred. It looks at the myriad reasons bodies and body parts have been preserved and the various functions they have served—from revered ‘relics’ to medicinal ingredients, from teaching and research objects to symbols of reconciliation.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1: Preserving the Dead—Holy and Secular Relics
Week 2: Eating the Dead—Cannibalism and Corpse Medicine
Week 3: Stealing the Dead—Grave Robbing and Dissection
Week 4: Collecting the Dead—Human Remains in Museums
Week 5: Field Trip to the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London
Week 6: Reading Week
Week 7: Disposing the Dead—Cemeteries and Ossuaries
Week 8: Interrogating the Dead—Forensic Medicine
Week 9: Resurrecting the Dead—Transplantation and Tissue Research
Week 10: Returning the Dead—Repatriation

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the ‘afterlife’ of human remains in the modern period, their role in medical research and practices since 1800, and their contested legacy as museum specimens.
• Communicate ideas and findings in both class discussions and academic writing.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source materials, including texts and objects, related to the history of human remains.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing multidisciplinary scholarship in medical history, material history, museum studies, indigenous studies, and medical ethics.

Indicative reading list

Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Warwick Anderson, The Collector of Lost Souls—Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, Murder and the Making of English CSI (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)

Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Sarah Farber and Sally Wilde, The Body Divided: Human Beings and Human ‘Material’ in Modern Medical History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011)

Cressida Fforde, C. Timothy McKeown and Honor Keeler (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation: Return Reconcile, Renew (London: Routledge, 2020)

Cressida Fforde, Collecting the Dead: Archaeology and the Reburial Issue (London: Duckworth, 2004)

David Hamilton, A History of Organ Transplantation: Ancient Legends to Modern Practice (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)

Elizabeth T. Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c. 1834-1929 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

Tiffany Jenkins, Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority (New York: Routledge, 2011)

Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds. The Fate of Anatomical Collections (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)

Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015)

Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found (New York: Norton, 2014)

Erin-Marie Legacey, Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830 (Itaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)

Margaret M. Lock, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)

Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)

Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016)

Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute: The Politics of the Corpse in Pre-Victorian Britain, 2nd Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

Ricardo Roque, Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870-1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002

Angela Stienne, Mummified: The Stories Behind Egyptian Mummies in Museums (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022)

Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, 2nd Ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016)

Kim A. Wagner, The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

Katherine D. Watson, Forensic Medicine in Western Society: A History (New York: Routledge, 2010)

Research element

Students will research and write a 3000-word essay, incorporating a synthesis and analysis of primary and secondary sources.

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.