Viewing Bodies: Medicine, Public Order, and English Inquest Practice

This essay examines the unsettled interaction between procedural, epistemological, and professional claims made upon a privileged object of inquiry: the dead body—at a particular investigative site: the English inquest. It takes as its analytical object a single feature of inquest practice, the jury’s view of the body, and considers how the campaign to restrict the view constituted an attempt to recast inquests as primarily scientific events. By purging the dead body of its connection to the inquest’s public features, the English medical community anticipated a fundamentally transformed investigative mechanism, one better equipped to carry out an interrogation of the dead in the interest of both medicine and the public. The inquest’s particular location at the interstices between these two constituencies makes this discussion in some senses peculiar to the inquest. However, the effort to displace the view also points to a more general project: that of carving out and stabilizing spheres of autonomous scientific activity. At issue in the debate about the dead body’s place at inquests was the proper relation between expert and public knowledge. ¹

The inquest was perhaps the most prominent point of regular contact between expert and lay knowledge in the formal structure of English civil order. At inquests, deaths that for one reason or another did not fit into “normal” structures of registration and explanation—those considered “unnatural,” “violent,” “sudden,” or “accidental”—were subjected to a public inquiry by a coroner and his lay jury. The great majority of the roughly three hundred English coroners were lawyers with no formal medical training; the cause of death was decided by the jury verdict; and the inquest was performed before a public audience and an attentive popular press. The English inquest thus differed from its Continental (and Scottish) counterparts in basing itself on a model of civic participation that consciously counterpoised the value of a self-monitoring liberal order to the purported evils of bureaucratic and centralized systems of death management. At its theoretical core lay the proposition that the public circulation of information concerning potentially disturbing deaths was a tool of social stability. In giving a formal context for the airing of the gossip, rumor, and suspicion generated by such deaths, the inquest diffused a tension that, if left to fester, might pose a threat to the reign of sense and reason. ²

This popular dimension of the English inquest placed it in an ambiguous relationship to the medical profession. On the one hand, medical expertise was accorded special evidentiary status at inquest deliberations. Yet medical critics of the inquest chaffed at its unscientific, “profane” features, ³ denouncing it as a lurid proceeding, a morbid spectacle that diluted the potential benefits of pure scientific investigation. For the English medical and medico-legal communities, advocates of “state medicine,” and certain organs of state and local government, the inquest was a prominent frustration to modern methods of death management, and from the mid-nineteenth century it became a favored object lesson illustrating the need for expert-oriented reform.

The mistreatment of the dead body lay at the core of the reformers’ declamations against the profane inquest. That the body should feature so prominently in such critiques was not surprising, for at the symbolic and operational center of every inquest lay the dead body: inquest writs framed the proceedings as “An inquiry upon the body of A. B.”; jurisdiction of the coroner was settled according to the district in which the body lay; inquests could not be held without a body (though at times body parts could serve as a sufficient pretext for a public inquiry into the cause of death); and the body had to be “viewed.”

The view of the body by the coroner and his jury was, in a strict procedural sense, quite literally a “view.” After the jury had been sworn in, and usually before any testimony had been heard, jurors and the coroner visited the body wherever it lay and examined it. While from a legal standpoint the view was held to be an inviolate feature of inquest procedure, ^4...