Full Description
In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the legal ambiguities of a lack of fully-informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second-place to the economics of the national and international commodification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as Open Access.
Contents
Part I. Relocating the Dead-End: A Consignment for the Cul-de-Sac of History?: 1. Disputed bodies and their hidden histories; 2. Res Nullius - nobody's thing; 3. The ministry of offal; Part II. Disputing Deadlines: 4. Implicit disputes: mapping systems of implied consent; 5. Explicit disputes: 'the balance of probability' in coronial cases; 6. Missed disputes: brainstorming neuroscience; Part III. Death-Sentences Delayed: 7. Conclusion: flesh is a dead format? Remapping the 'human atlas'.
