Clique em uma foto para ir ao Google Livros
Carregando... Death, Dissection and the Destitute (2000)de Ruth Richardson
Nenhum(a) Carregando...
Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. An important work about the commodification of the corpse, outlining how the poor were not just the primary victims of burking and body snatching, but after the Anatomy Act was passed, it was their bodies that were taken from workhouses and hospitals for dissection. Commodification of the corpse also includes the funeral industry, and the desperate attempts to avoid a pauper's funeral. ( ) In 1817, Mary Shelley first thought of the story that would become “Frankenstein,” in which the eponymous doctor uses corpses to reanimate a dead man. And even as she wrote this classic, resurrection men across Britain were stealing dead bodies to sell to medical schools, which were legally permitted to use only the bodies of executed murderers for the study of anatomy. There weren’t that many murderers, and demand outstripped supply. The Anatomy Act of 1832 was intended to suppress the trade that resulted by legalizing the anatomization of the body of anyone who had died without being able to afford funeral expenses, but in so doing, it criminalized the poor merely for being poor. Ruth Richardson’s pioneering study of the Act, those who created it, and those who fought it, ranges from the “cholera riots” that broke out as the first great epidemic swept across the country to the political upheavals that produced the Reform Act, which some historians consider to be the start of modern democracy in Britain. Connecting all this disparate information creates a book that, in analyzing how a society treated its dead, shows us how it treated its living. Class-based study of the issues surrounding human dissection in the first half of 19th century Britain. Shows how superstitious fear of dissection was pervasive at all levels of society, but how the criminalisation of poverty of the New Poor Laws enabled the rich to avoid dissection, not only an enormous indignity, but thought to be a possible barrier to heaven.. The book is comprehensive in its coverage of British thought surrounding the topic, but I think a comparison with other European countries would have shed more light—were the poor in France disproportionately subject to dissection? were German protestants as fearful of ascending to heaven with a mutilated body? was dissection used as a criminal punishment in other countries? sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
In the early nineteenth century, body snatching was rife because the only corpses available for medical study were those of hanged murderers. With the Anatomy Act of 1832, however, the bodies of those who died destitute in workhouses were appropriated for dissection. At a time when such a procedure was regarded with fear and revulsion, the Anatomy Act effectively rendered dissection a punishment for poverty. Providing both historical and contemporary insights, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute opens rich new prospects in history and history of science. The new afterword draws important parallels between social and medical history and contemporary concerns regarding organs for transplant and human tissue for research. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
Current DiscussionsNenhum(a)Capas populares
Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)393.0941Social sciences Customs, Etiquette, Folklore Social aspects of Death (Thanatology)Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
É você?Torne-se um autor do LibraryThing. |