Reviews

Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories by Helen Macdonald

selfwinding's review against another edition

4.0

I tackled this book for character research for a 19th century doctor who is extremely interested in understanding (and improving) anatomy. I was particularly interested in the character of public dissections and what was and wasn't allowed to be studied on bodies, where the bodies were coming from, and also whose bodies were used. This book gives a lot of information about the bodies, characterizing the people who were used during this practice (murderers, the poor, Aborigines) and the ways doctors and academics systemically erased the people who had inhabited the bodies. MacDonald exercises compassion in humanizing and de-objectifying the bodies while also adequately expressing a reason for that objectification (to therefore make their studies dispassionate). She also clearly explains how bodies were blatantly stolen and how laws were abused or ignored (yay, science).

For my purposes, the first two chapters provided the most information, but the context and collector-mentality of the 19th century discussed in the later chapters are certainly informative as well.