Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830-1926 (review)

Ian A. Burney. Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830-1926. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. x + 245 pp. Ill. $39.95 (0-8018-6240-X).

University of Manchester research lecturer Ian Burney provides an extremely rich analysis of the complex and changing dynamic between scientific experts and the public regarding the coroner's postmortem inquest in England from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In five densely argued and well-supported chapters, he dissects and displays the tensions that arose between medical reformers and the public as the inquest became a fulcrum of power in the balance of the body politic. The ancient practice of public inquests (or tribunals) served to elicit answers and satisfy queries regarding the "facts" surrounding an individual's death. As Burney claims, since "reliable knowledge of death was one of the keys to legislating for an increasingly biological conception of 'population' and since dead bodies were themselves fundamental units of this knowledge, the inquest's jurisdiction in one respect seemed to make it the very type of investigative resource on which new forms of bureaucratic management depended" (p. 2).

In the early nineteenth century, coroners were elected to their life position by fellow local county freeholders. Their inquests were limited to investigating cases of accidental, suspicious, violent, or otherwise "unnatural" deaths. Their objective: to determine the underlying cause of such mysterious deaths. Verdicts were delivered by a jury composed of twelve to twenty-four local men whom coroners, like judges, advised on what constituted evidence and on other "legal" matters. To fulfill the request of an open inquest, the jury and coroner dutifully viewed the corpse, questioned witnesses, and deliberated their findings before a public gathering, often in the setting of a "public house" (i.e., a pub).

Burney challenges scholarly conviction that scientific and public concepts of knowledge are constituted by separate scientific and public spheres, respectively. Instead, he boldly demonstrates how the identity of what became scientific versus public knowledge was disputed and ultimately decided within scientific discourse. In so doing, he expands our awareness of the process of producing and legitimizing knowledge. Perhaps he could have more precisely qualified his use of "science," for the changes he focuses upon occurred at precisely the same time that "science" in general shifted from an amateur to a professional following.

The opening chapter vividly depicts Lancet editor Thomas Wakley's highly politicized campaign for county coroner, and his limited success in medicalizing this role. The book then turns to evaluate the distinct but related meanings of death inferred by inquests, which focused on the individual, versus the civil registration of deaths, which focused on collective aggregates. Burney carefully interweaves the growing public health interests of statistically represented death into the intense debate over progressive medical reform at the inquest.

Employing the art of a coroner, Burney then shifts our gaze to the body itself, describing both its physical and symbolic significance. Myriad issues are addressed in the third chapter, ranging from the dignity of the deceased, the role of the mortuary, and the strain upon public sensitivities, to the transmission of disease via inspecting the corpse. One method introduced to counteract the latter concern was the use of a body-preservation apparatus--a steel-constructed, coffin-like chamber in which the exposed body was laid and preserved via electrically recirculated formaldehyde vapors; a large window gave jury members an easy view of the body, all the while protecting them from any noxious, infectious agents emanating from the corpse. Little doubt remained over the intrusion of medical technology into the once-public space of the inquest. However, the protective barrier of the apparatus also introduced scientific error into the judgment of the jury, for it distanced jurors from many signs on the corpse's "map of its own death...