Main description:

In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the legal ambiguities of a lack of fully-informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second-place to the economics of the national and international commodification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as Open Access.

Contents:

Part I. Relocating the Dead-End: A Consignment for the Cul-de-Sac of History?: 1. Disputed bodies and their hidden histories; 2. Res Nullius - nobody's thing; 3. The ministry of offal; Part II. Disputing Deadlines: 4. Implicit disputes: mapping systems of implied consent; 5. Explicit disputes: 'the balance of probability' in coronial cases; 6. Missed disputes: brainstorming neuroscience; Part III. Death-Sentences Delayed: 7. Conclusion: flesh is a dead format? Remapping the 'human atlas'.