Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (review)

The whaler William Lanney, also called King Bill, died at an inn in a seedy part of Hobart Town, Tasmania, in March 1869. His death set off a multifaceted series of events, which turned into a scandal of sorts. The story involves grave robbing, stolen skulls, cut off hands and feet, clandestine dissection, a pouch made of human skin and a fight over the man's bones. For the whaler was thought to be the last Tasmanian Aboriginal man, and as such a valuable scientific specimen and collection trophy. Australian historian Helen MacDonald narrates this story in great detail in her book Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (New Haven 2006), tying it to local as well as international contexts, and using it to discuss the intricate topic of race and science in the age of colonialism.

Human Remains is a social history of anatomy and colonial medical science of the British Empire, using the local history of Tasmanian anatomy. MacDonald makes a good job of describing and illustrating the mid-Victorian "mania" of skull-collection among medical men, and of showing how metropolitan scientists and colonial men forged links by collecting human remains, shipping them across the world, exchanging them as gifts, and displaying them in private and public museums. Tasmanian aboriginal bodies were rare, and therefore sought after, especially since their "race" was being extinguished as a cause of the colonization of their land. In MacDonald's words,

[t]his turned scientific work on them into an urgent project in which colonial men contributed by collecting the material that informed European debates. They gathered the Tasmanians' words to make dictionaries, and samples of their material culture in the form of tools, weapons, baskets and necklaces made from shells. They collected information about their burial and mourning rites. And, in the knowledge that the Tasmanians held strong beliefs about the due treatment of their dead, medical men contributed in the way to which they were ideally suited. They harvested their bodies.

[p. 94 ff]

Human Remains is also a history of death, especially the importance of the dead body to medical science during its formation in the 19th century. (Two of the more well known titles in this field are Ruth Richardson's classic study of early 19th century British history Death, Dissection and the Destitute [London 1988], and Michael Sappol's A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America [Princeton, 2002], and MacDonald positions her own work as closely related to them.) This area of study is important not only because it enriches our understanding of a significant and disturbing part of medical history, but because it offers tools for understanding and historically situating contemporary dealings with dead bodies. MacDonald is aware of this, and opens the book with a compelling discussion of anatomist Günther von Hagens' ethically problematic public dissection of a human cadaver in London 2002, his exhibition of plastinated bodies in the Bodyworlds exhibitions, and contemporary scandals involving body parts harvested for obscure medical usage. There is, however, no simple correspondence between now and then, and the book lacks a discussion of what, exactly, we can learn from history, and how ethical codes, legal regulations, and cultural attitudes concerning dead bodies have changed since the 19th century. MacDonald is excellent at narrating and discussing subtleties in historical dealings with corpses, but in her reflections on current issues, and the tradition of "abuses" of human remains, her words betray moralizing resentment of a very contemporary kind, sometimes clouding an otherwise clear and disinterested view.

Human Remains is pleasant to read, and very accessible to general readers, but as a researcher I sometimes miss more informative footnotes and some theoretical or analytical discussion relating the material to existing literature. These objections aside, the book is a substantial contribution to the history of anatomy, not only because it connects events in the remote, peripheral, colonial territory of Tasmania to the socio-cultural history ofWestern science, but mostly because...