Overview
- Examines the impact of changing medical practices and cultural attitudes towards death and the donation of bodies to medical facilities at the turn of the twentieth century
- Takes a unique methodological approach, following the trajectory of the corpse in anatomy from acquisition to disposal
- Offers new insights into understudied European centres, drawing comparisons with other continental cases and showing how religious and cultural ideas influenced the practice of dissection
Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History (MBSMH)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
“Tinne Claes has written a wonderful study on anatomy in fin-de-siècle Belgium. This book is certainly greater than its parts and will provide intellectual sustenance and great pleasure to all those who read it. … What Claes has produced is a fascinating, thought-provoking and extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of the modernist society in the Western World which forms the basis for most current debates about what it is to be a social human.” (Ross L. Jones, Metascience, Vol. 30, 2021)
“In this fine book Tinne Claes takes the history of anatomy out of the nineteenth century and into our own times. She shows that, to understand the hitherto little studied transition from body snatching and the shame of dissection to voluntary donation in the service of science, we must follow both anatomists and prospective cadavers as they move through the physically and socio-politically transforming city: from hospital beds and dissection halls to political arenas and burial grounds.” (Tatjana Buklijas, University of Auckland, New Zealand )“The coercive laws and secret arrangements through which nineteenth-century anatomists obtained the corpses of the poor are better known than how anatomical donation became the norm in the twentieth century. This ground-breaking book argues that democratic politics and egalitarian attitudes – from the rise of consent in clinics to less punitive approaches to poverty – forced change on anatomy around 1900. By reconstructing anatomists’ post-mortem practices and the stories of those they dissected, Tinne Claes offers a compelling account of how nobodies began to become somebodies.” (Nick Hopwood, author of Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (2015))
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Tinne Claes is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cultural History since 1750 Research Group at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), Belgium.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Corpses in Belgian Anatomy, 1860–1914
Book Subtitle: Nobody’s Dead
Authors: Tinne Claes
Series Title: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20115-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-20114-2Published: 02 December 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-20117-3Published: 02 December 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-20115-9Published: 20 November 2019
Series ISSN: 2947-9142
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9150
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 323
Number of Illustrations: 21 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Germany and Central Europe, History of Medicine, History of Science, Cultural History, Social History