The Corpse: A History (review)

The Corpse: A History could really be better entitled “The Corpse: Everything You Always Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask.” This interesting and entertaining book reads like “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” It is not a serious historical work, although it does draw examples from many different times and cultures. The author presents a series of very brief, sensationalistic anecdotes, most only one to a few sentences in length, which are topically arranged, are often poorly referenced, and may jump many hundreds of years and/or across continents or hemispheres in the same paragraph. The many topics related to corpses include (among others) their depiction in art and literature; their preparation, display, and disposition; their decomposition and preservation (i.e., cryonic suspension and mummification); anatomical gifts and the exhibition of medical specimens; premature burial and the “undead”; the collecting of body parts as souvenirs and relics; autopsies and forensic investigations; public exhibition and posthumous punishment; grave robbing and body snatching; and necrophilia. However, the discussion on any one topic is too superficial to be useful to the historian, and Quigley often fails to cite standard scholarly historical sources. For instance, in the sections on grave robbing and body snatching, she cites only popular press sources, although much historical literature exists on this topic.

Two of the most serious deficiencies are that the author uses almost exclusively secondary sources, mostly of the sensationalistic genre (e.g., titles such as C. E. Maine, The Bizarre and the Bloody: A Clutch of Weird Crimes—Each Shockingly True! [1967], and Robert Wilkins, The Bedside Book of Death: Macabre Tales of Our Final Passage [1990]), and that she tends to treat all sources with equal credibility. For instance, in her discussion of how ancient Egyptian mummies have at times been plundered as a source of materials, she relates the following story: “During the Civil War, Augustus Stanwood, owner of a paper mill in Maine, ran short of rags and made pulp from the bandages of Egyptian mummies. Because he was unable to bleach the resulting brown paper, he sold it to butchers and grocers to wrap food. Unfortunately, this caused a cholera epidemic” (p. 242). Not only is this tale unreferenced, it is blatantly implausible: Vibrio cholerae is almost exclusively spread by the fecal contamination of drinking water, and could not survive thousands of years in a desiccated state.

My final major concern with this book is that, at least in my areas of expertise, Quigley has often presented topics by citing a series of sensationalistic examples that are far from the mainstream and, without the presentation of alternative information, could lead the reader to form erroneous conclusions. For instance, the discussion of using abortuses as tissue donors for transplantation, although hardly a historical topic, focuses on a theoretical problem that a woman could become pregnant “with the intention of aborting the fetus and using its organs” or selling them, and then concludes that there is a need for governmental regulation of “the fetal tissue industry” (p. 285). This is a naïve assertion, given the poor efficacy of fetal transplantation to date and the current sophistication of bioethical review procedures.

Death and dying are emotional and extremely value-laden topics that any historian would approach with temerity. Although I cannot recommend The Corpse: A History as an important historical reference, it does make for titillating reading.