Download or read book A Traffic of Dead Bodies written by Michael Sappol and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.

Download or read book Driving with Dead People written by Monica Holloway and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-12-09 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At nine years old, Monica Holloway develops a fascination with the local funeral home. Small wonder, with a father who drives his Ford pick up with a Kodak movie camera sitting shotgun just in case he sees an accident, and whose home movies feature more footage of disasters than of his children. In between her father's bouts of violence and abuse, Monica becomes fast friends with Julie Kilner, whose father is the town mortician. She and Julie preferred the casket showroom to the parks and grassy backyards in her hometown of Elk Grove, Ohio, where they would take turns lying in their favourite coffins. In time, Monica and Julie get a job driving the company hearse to pick up bodies from the airport, yet even Monica's growing independence can't protect her from her parents' irresponsibility, and from the feeling that she simply does not deserve to be safe. Little does she know, as she finally strikes out on her own, that her parents' biggest betrayal has yet to be revealed...

Download or read book Dissection written by John Harley Warner and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a startling window into the education of American doctors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries-on both a visceral level and for its revealing cultural record. Cringe-worthy shots of medical students-bare-handed gentlemen and a few ladies in street clothes show off their scalpels, saws and textbooks-while their cadavers, mostly poor and black, are awkwardly posed, and exposed. In one stunning shot, a black woman looks out from behind the young students. "What are we to make of an African-American woman, standing, broom handle in hand, behind the dissection table, her gaze fixed on the camera?" the authors ask. More importantly, they conclude, the photo is now drawn "out of the shadows of history" where "we can at least bear witness." A blood-soaked dissection table makes you want to look away and the dark humor of students playing pranks with skeletons are both hilarious and horrible. Postcards sent to family and friends must have caused shock and awe for postmen and recipient alike. Here, a difficult glance into medicine's "uncomfortable past" offers a grand opportunity to understand the legacy doctors and patients live with, and benefit from, today. Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Download or read book Chaucer s Dead Body written by Thomas Augustine Prendergast and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book Speaking for the Dead written by Maja I Whitaker and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking for the Dead is an incisive examination of the highly topical and often controversial issues surrounding the use of human cadavers in scientific research. Fully revised and updated to include recent developments in this area, this new edition incorporates the repeated organ scandals in the UK, body parts scandals in the United States, and the abuses of bodies in China. The book provides new material on neuroimaging, neuroethics and Alzheimer's disease and the major ethical issues they raise for society, in addition to discussing plastination in the form of BodyWorlds types of exhibitions. As human anatomists and bioethicists, the authors offer a unique perspective on these issues, crossing the boundaries between clinical, medical, legal and ethical concerns. Their exploration of both historical and contemporary data results in a clear and comprehensive examination of issues at the forefront of bioethics. With its clear writing style and use of non-technical language Speaking for the Dead will be an essential book for all those interested in bioethics, an area which continues to increase in significance with the development of new techniques for the manipulation of human cadavers. As human anatomists and bioethicists, the authors offer a unique perspective on these issues, crossing the boundaries between clinical, medical, legal and ethical concerns. Their exploration of historical developments as well as their analyses of recent case studies result in a pertinent and comprehensive examination of issues at the forefront of bioethics.

Download or read book Body Brokers written by Annie Cheney and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-03-13 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.” —Epictetus “Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will follow.” —Matthew 24:28 Body Brokers is an audacious, disturbing, and compellingly written investigative exposé of the lucrative business of procuring, buying, and selling human cadavers and body parts. Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these “body brokers” capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever: commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000. As journalist Annie Cheney found while reporting on this subject over the course of three years, when there’s that much money to be made with no federal regulation, there are all sorts of shady (and fascinating) characters who are willing to employ questionable practices—from deception and outright theft—to acquire, market and distribute human bodies and parts. In Michigan and New York she discovers funeral directors who buy corpses from medical schools and supply the parts to surgical equipment companies and associations of surgeons. In California, she meets a crematorium owner who sold the body parts of people he was supposed to cremate, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits. In Florida, she attends a medical conference in a luxury hotel, where fresh torsos are delivered in Igloo coolers and displayed on gurneys in a room normally used for banquets. “That torso that you’re living in right now is just flesh and bones to me. To me, it’s a product,” says the New Jersey-based broker presiding over the torsos. Tracing the origins of body brokering from the “resurrectionists” of the nineteenth century to the entrepreneurs of today, Cheney chronicles how demand for cadavers has long driven unscrupulous funeral home, crematorium and medical school personnel to treat human bodies as commodities. Gripping, often chilling, and sure to cause a reexamination of the American way of death, Body Brokers is both a captivating work of first-person reportage and a surprising inside look at a little-known aspect of the “death care” world.

Download or read book American Body Snatchers written by Richard S. Ross III and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-07-31 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the 19th century, physicians teaching anatomy in New England medical schools expected students to have hands-on experience with cadavers. As the only bodies that could be dissected legally were convicted murderers, this led to a lack of sufficient bodies for study. These doctors and their students turned to removing the dead from graveyards and cemeteries for dissection. The first medical school in Washington, D.C. was founded in 1825, headed by a Massachusetts physician convicted of body snatching, and made the practice commonplace in the area. This history of body snatching in the 19th century focuses on medical schools in New England and Washington, D.C., along with the religious, moral, and social objections during the time. With research from contemporary newspapers, medical articles, and university archives, topics such as state anatomy laws and their effects on doctors, students, and the poor--who were the usual victims--are covered, as are perceptions of physicians and medical schools by the local communities.

Download or read book Unburied Bodies written by James R. Martel and published by Amherst College Press. This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human body is the locus of meaning, personhood, and our sense of the possibility of sanctity. The desecration of the human corpse is a matter of universal revulsion, taboo in virtually all human cultures. Not least for this reason, the unburied corpse quickly becomes a focal point of political salience, on the one hand seeming to express the contempt of state power toward the basic claims of human dignity—while on the other hand simultaneously bringing into question the very legitimacy of that power. In Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead, James Martel surveys the power of the body left unburied to motivate resistance, to bring forth a radically new form of agency, and to undercut the authority claims made by state power. Ranging across time and space from the battlefields of ancient Thebes to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and taking in perspectives from such writers as Sophocles, Machiavelli, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Thomas Lacqueur, and Bonnie Honig, Martel asks why the presence of the abandoned corpse can be seen by both authorities and protesters as a source of power, and how those who have been abandoned or marginalized by structures of authority can find in a lifeless body fellow accomplices in their aspirations for dignity and humanity.

Download or read book Over Your Dead Body written by Dan Wells and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Dan Wells continues his popular John Wayne Cleaver series in Over Your Dead Body. John and Brooke are on their own, hitchhiking from town to town as they hunt the last of the Withered through the midwest--but the Withered are hunting them back, and the FBI is close behind. With each new town, each new truck stop, each new highway, they get closer to a vicious killer who defies every principle of profiling and prediction John knows how to use, and meanwhile Brooke's fractured psyche teeters on the edge of oblivion, overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of dead personalities sharing her mind. She flips in and out of lucidity, manifesting new names and thoughts and memories every day, until at last the one personality pops up that John never expected and has no idea how to deal with. The last of Nobody's victims, trapped forever in the body of his last remaining friend. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Rest in Pieces written by Bess Lovejoy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer's office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination.

Download or read book The Lady Anatomist written by Rebecca Messbarger and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714-74), a woman artist and scientist, surmounted meager origins and limited formal education to become one of the most acclaimed anatomical sculptors of the Enlightenment. The Lady Anatomist tells the story of her arresting life and times, in light of the intertwined histories of science, gender, and art that complicated her rise to fame in the eighteenth century. Examining the details of Morandi’s remarkable life, Rebecca Messbarger traces her intellectual trajectory from provincial artist to internationally renowned anatomical wax modeler for the University of Bologna’s famous medical school. Placing Morandi’s work within its cultural and historical context, as well as in line with the Italian tradition of anatomical studies and design, Messbarger uncovers the messages contained within Morandi’s wax inscriptions, part complex theories of the body and part poetry. Widely appealing to those with an interest in the tangled histories of art and the body, and including lavish, full-color reproductions of Morandi’s work, The Lady Anatomist is a sophisticated biography of a true visionary.

Download or read book Bodies in the Streets The Somaesthetics of City Life written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-08-12 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen original essays explore the qualities and challenges of urban life (in Europe, Asia, and the Americas) from a variety of disciplinary perspectives that illustrate the aesthetic, cultural, and political roles of bodies in the city streets.

Download or read book Beyond the Body written by Elizabeth Hallam and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-16 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors challenge theories that put the body at the centre of identity, going 'beyond the body' to highlight the persistence of self-identity even when the body itself has been disposed of or is missing.

Download or read book After We Die written by Norman L. Cantor and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What will become of our earthly remains? What happens to our bodies during and after the various forms of cadaver disposal available? Who controls the fate of human remains? What legal and moral constraints apply? Legal scholar Norman Cantor provides a graphic, informative, and entertaining exploration of these questions. After We Die chronicles not only a corpse’s physical state but also its legal and moral status, including what rights, if any, the corpse possesses. In a claim sure to be controversial, Cantor argues that a corpse maintains a “quasi-human status" granting it certain protected rights—both legal and moral. One of a corpse’s purported rights is to have its predecessor’s disposal choices upheld. After We Die reviews unconventional ways in which a person can extend a personal legacy via their corpse’s role in medical education, scientific research, or tissue transplantation. This underlines the importance of leaving instructions directing post-mortem disposal. Another cadaveric right is to be treated with respect and dignity. After We Die outlines the limits that “post-mortem human dignity” poses upon disposal options, particularly the use of a cadaver or its parts in educational or artistic displays. Contemporary illustrations of these complex issues abound. In 2007, the well-publicized death of Anna Nicole Smith highlighted the passions and disputes surrounding the handling of human remains. Similarly, following the 2003 death of baseball great Ted Williams, the family in-fighting and legal proceedings surrounding the corpse’s proposed cryogenic disposal also raised contentious questions about the physical, legal, and ethical issues that emerge after we die. In the tradition of Sherwin Nuland's How We Die, Cantor carefully and sensitively addresses the post-mortem handling of human remains.

Download or read book Count the Dead written by Stephen Berry and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global doubling of human life expectancy between 1850 and 1950 is arguably one of the most consequential developments in human history, undergirding massive improvements in human life and lifestyles. In 1850, Americans died at an average age of 30. Today, the average is almost 80. This story is typically told as a series of medical breakthroughs—Jenner and vaccination, Lister and antisepsis, Snow and germ theory, Fleming and penicillin—but the lion's share of the credit belongs to the men and women who dedicated their lives to collecting good data. Examining the development of death registration systems in the United States—from the first mortality census in 1850 to the development of the death certificate at the turn of the century—Count the Dead argues that mortality data transformed life on Earth, proving critical to the systemization of public health, casualty reporting, and human rights. Stephen Berry shows how a network of coroners, court officials, and state and federal authorities developed methods to track and reveal patterns of dying. These officials harnessed these records to turn the collective dead into informants and in so doing allowed the dead to shape life and death as we know it today.

Download or read book Death Modernity and the Body written by Eva Åhrén and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative study that explores medical, social, cultural, and aesthetic customs and practices of treating the dead body in Sweden in an era of modernization.

Download or read book The Corpse Queen written by Heather M. Herrman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Deliciously macabre and utterly decadent.” —Kerri Maniscalco, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Stalking Jack the Ripper In this dark and twisty feminist historical mystery, a teenage girl starts a new life as a grave robber but quickly becomes entangled in a murderer's plans. Soon after her best friend Kitty mysteriously dies, orphaned seventeen-year-old Molly Green is sent away to live with her "aunt." With no relations that she knows of, Molly assumes she has been sold as a maid for the price of an extra donation in the church orphanage's coffers. Such a thing is not unheard of. There are only so many options for an unmarried girl in 1850s Philadelphia. Only, when Molly arrives, she discovers her aunt is very much real, exceedingly wealthy, and with secrets of her own. Secrets and wealth she intends to share—for a price. Molly's estranged aunt Ava, has built her empire by robbing graves and selling the corpses to medical students who need bodies to practice surgical procedures. And she wants Molly to help her procure the corpses. As Molly learns her aunt's trade in the dead of night and explores the mansion by day, she is both horrified and deeply intrigued by the anatomy lessons held at the old church on her aunt's property. Enigmatic Doctor LaValle's lessons are a heady mixture of knowledge and power and Molly has never wanted anything more than to join his male-only group of students. But the cost of inclusion is steep and with a murderer loose in the city, the pursuit of power and opportunity becomes a deadly dance.