Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories (review)

During the nineteenth century, bodies and body parts became increasingly valuable commodities. As Mary Fissell and Ruth Richardson have shown, British anatomists felt entitled to any cadaver they could get their hands on, leaving no grave unturned and no hospital morgue unrifled in their quest for "subjects." Helen MacDonald contributes to this argument by demonstrating that the same conditions applied halfway around the world in the British colony in Tasmania. If, as Fissell and Richardson have argued, the edifice of British medicine was built upon the bodies of the poor, MacDonald convincingly demonstrates that the construction materials included convicts and aboriginal peoples as well.

The book begins with a discussion of episodes in the history of British dissection that reinforced the systematic stripping of personhood from the subject: from the public "galvinising" of bodies at the Royal College of Physicians of London, to the Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh. But this is a cursory discussion, in which MacDonald sometimes gets her details wrong. The heart of the book is in chapters 2 through 5, which re-create several episodes illustrative of the commodification of bodies. The first body had belonged, in life, to Mary McLauchlan, a transported convict executed for the crime of murdering her illegitimate child. Her dissection shows how a body could become a kind of medical football, as surgeons contended for possession of available cadavers. The dissection of William Lanney, considered to be the "last" male aboriginal Tasmanian, brings the image of football to mind once more, as his skull, hands, feet, and skin were contested, stolen, repossessed, and fumbled. The extinction of aboriginal Tasmanians made their skeletons and skulls collector's items in Britain and abroad: "collecting human bones was a kind of mid-Victorian mania, shared by amateurs and professionals alike" (p. 96), including the most prestigious museums and scientific institutions. As MacDonald indicates, they became one of the most effective items of exchange for Australian scientists wishing to enhance their reputations with their London colleagues.

MacDonald gives voice to formerly silent "subjects" of the dissecting rooms, but the bulk of her sources come from the medical men who observed, sketched, and cut into them. This creates a tension within the book, for while she clearly disapproves of their practices, they themselves evinced no sign that they were doing anything wrong. This tension is never resolved, and the reader is left pondering what, if anything, the doctors could have done differently. Dissected with more respect? Dissected to greater purpose than the enhancement of their own reputations? Not dissected at all, unless given permission by the deceased or their families? Would any of these, or all three together, have been enough to prevent the commodification of cadavers? Once a use and a price had been found for body parts, was there anything that could have curtailed their trade?

That there could be another way to reconcile the uses of the dead with the respect owed their remains is clear from a handful of accounts that have survived from St. Cuthbert's Church in Edinburgh from the 1840s, documenting the fees paid by anatomists for the burial of bodies dissected in their classrooms: the name and age at death of each cadaver is recorded, returning to them some measure of humanity in exchange for their dismemberment in the cause of medical education. This was not a spontaneous gesture on the part of the anatomists, but rather was mandated by the Anatomy Act of 1832. As MacDonald shows, the history of nineteenth-century dissection offers few such examples of respect for human remains.