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Introduction

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Corpses in Belgian Anatomy, 1860–1914

Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History ((MBSMH))

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Abstract

The introduction focuses on the connecting thread of this book: the tension between the corpse as object and subject. Most historians have described the practices of anatomists as the pinnacle of objectification. Dismembered, dissected and conserved, deceased persons were converted into dead objects. Claes shows that this interpretation, though valuable, should be reassessed and limited in time. Around 1900, anatomists started to treat the body as a subject rather than an object under the influence of, amongst other developments, changes in burial rituals and an increased importance of consent in medical ethics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    BSAP 11 (1866): 3–5.

  2. 2.

    Quotes from BSAP 4 (1861): 2.

  3. 3.

    BSAP 11 (1866): 5.

  4. 4.

    Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 72.

  5. 5.

    For example: Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 98–135; Helen MacDonald, Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 74–93; Elizabeth T. Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834–1929 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Dániel Margócsy, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

  6. 6.

    For example: Anna Maerker, “The Anatomical Models of La Specola: Production, Uses and Reception,” Nuncius: Istituto e museo di storia della scienza 21, no. 2 (2006): 295–321.

  7. 7.

    For example: Ruth Richardson, “A Necessary Inhumanity?,” Medical Humanities 26, no. 2 (2000): 104–6.

  8. 8.

    Helen MacDonald, “A Body Buried is a Body Wasted: The Spoils of Human Dissection,” in The Body Divided: Human Beings and Human ‘Material’ in Modern Medical History, eds. Sarah Ferber and Sally Wilde (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 11.

  9. 9.

    Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine, 30.

  10. 10.

    Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 96 and 141–2; Rina Knoeff and Rob Zwijnenberg, “Setting the Stage,” in The Fate of Anatomical Collections, eds. Rina Knoeff and Rob Zwijnenberg (London: Ashgate, 2015), 3–6; Lisa O’ Sullivan and Ross L. Jones, “Two Australian Fetuses: Frederic Wood Jones and the Work of an Anatomical Specimen,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89, no. 2 (2015): 243–66.

  11. 11.

    Nicholas D. Jewson, “The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770–1870,” Sociology 10, no. 2 (1976): 225–44.

  12. 12.

    John V. Pickstone, Medicine and Industrial Society: A History of Hospital Development in Manchester and Its Region 1752–1946 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 48.

  13. 13.

    Jewson, “The Disappearance of the Sick-Man,” 225–44. See also: David Armstrong, “Bodies of Knowledge/Knowledge of Bodies,” in Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body, eds. Colin Jones and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 17–27.

  14. 14.

    Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1973), 124–48.

  15. 15.

    Most importantly Martha Nussbaum, “Objectification,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (1995): 249–91.

  16. 16.

    Helen Lambert and Maryon McDonald, “Introduction,” in Social Bodies, eds. Helen Lambert and Maryon McDonald (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2011), 1–15.

  17. 17.

    John Troyer, “Embalmed Vision,” Mortality 12, no. 1 (2007): 22–47; Cara Krmpotich, Joost Fontein, and John Harries, “The Substance of Bones: The Emotive Materiality and Affective Presence of Human Remains,” Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 4 (2010): 371–84.

  18. 18.

    Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Routledge, 2004), 35.

  19. 19.

    Elizabeth Hallam, “Articulating Bones: An Epilogue,” Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 4 (2012): 465.

  20. 20.

    John R. Sofaer, The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xiii-2.

  21. 21.

    On the theory of co-production: Luigi Pellizoni, “Construction, Co-production, and Beyond. Academic Disputes and Public Concerns in the Recent Debate on Nature and Society,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 6 (2014): 851–64.

  22. 22.

    In other words, corpses have both material (as things) and abducted human agency (as persons) in interactions with the living. See also: Krmpotich, Fontein and Harries, “The Substance of Bones,” 373.

  23. 23.

    For more examples, see: Kaat Wils, Raf de Bont, and Sokhieng Au, eds., Bodies Beyond Borders: Moving Anatomies, 1750–1950 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017).

  24. 24.

    Rina Knoeff, “Touching Anatomy: On the Handling of Preparations in the Anatomical Cabinets of Frederik Ruysch 1638–1731,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 49, no. 1 (2015): 32–44.

  25. 25.

    Anna Maerker, Model Experts. Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).

  26. 26.

    Alberti, Morbid Curiosities, 164; Idem, “Objects and the Museum,” Isis 96, no. 4 (2005): 559–71.

  27. 27.

    Elizabeth T. Hurren, “Abnormalities and Deformities. The Dissection and Internment of the Insane Poor, 1832–1929,” History of Psychiatry 23, no. 1 (2012): 65–77.

  28. 28.

    Rafael Mandressi, “Affected Doctors: Dead Bodies and Affective and Professional Cultures in Early Modern European Anatomy,” Osiris 31, no. 1 (2016): 119–36, on p. 120.

  29. 29.

    I borrow this phrase from Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine, 67–8.

  30. 30.

    Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 388–412. See also: Régis Bertrand, Mort et mémoire. Provence, XVIIIe-XXe siècles, Une approche d’historien (Marseille: La Thune, 2001), 21–56. On Belgium: Christophe De Spiegeleer, “Secularisering van stedelijke begraafplaatsen in de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw in België,” in R.I.P. Aspecten van 200 jaar begrafeniscultuur in Vlaanderen, ed. Tamara Ingels (Ghent: Liberaal Archief, 2015), 5–21.

  31. 31.

    Julie Rugg, “Constructing the Grave: Competing Burial Ideals in Nineteenth-Century England,” Social History 38, no. 3 (2013): 328–45, on p. 329.

  32. 32.

    Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 215–38.

  33. 33.

    Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. P.M. Ranum (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974), 55–84.

  34. 34.

    Sarah Tarlow, “The Aesthetic Corpse in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality, eds. Yannis Hamilakis, Mark Pluciennik, and Sara Tarlow (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001), 85–95, on p. 94.

  35. 35.

    Julie M. Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 66–97; Troyer, “Embalmed Vision,” 22–47.

  36. 36.

    On the United States: Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 34–8. On France: Thomas A. Kselman, Death and Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 222–56. On Belgium: Christophe De Spiegeleer, “Sterven, begraven en herdenken van koninklijke en politieke elites in België tussen 1830 en 1940: een culturele en politieke geschiedenis” (PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2016), 121–7, 296–309, and 316–18.

  37. 37.

    For example: Troyer, “Embalmed Vision,” 22–47; Anne Carol, Embaumement: une passion romantique, France XIXe siècle (Lyon: Champ Vallon, 2016), 95–127.

  38. 38.

    Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  39. 39.

    Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 125–64.

  40. 40.

    For example: Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Death, and Pauper Funerals,” Representations 1, no. 1 (1983): 109–31; Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, 275; Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 36.

  41. 41.

    On the history of consent in the German lands: Barbara Elkeles, “The German Debate on Human Experimentation between 1880–1914,” in Twentieth Century Ethics of Human Subject Research, eds. Volker Roelcke and Giovanni Maio (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), 18–33; Andreas-Holger Maehle, Doctors, Honour and the Law. Medical Ethics in Imperial Germany (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 69–94. On France and Britain, see: Emmanuel Betta, “Between Law and Profession: The Origins of Informed Consent (1840–1900),” in Doctors and Patients. History, Representation, Communication from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Maria Malatesta (San Francisco: University of California Medical Humanities Press, 2015), 108–33.

  42. 42.

    Maehle, Doctors, Honour and the Law, 84–95.

  43. 43.

    On nineteenth-century medical experimentation, see: William Bynum, “Reflections on the History of Human Experimentation,” in The Use of Human Beings in Research. With Special Reference to Clinical Trials, eds. Stuart F. Spicker et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 1988), 29–46; Marion Maria Ruisinger, “Geschichte des Humanexperiments. Zur Entwicklung der Forschung am Menschen,” in Standards der Forschung. Historische Entwicklung und ethische Grundlagen klinischer Studien, eds. Andreas Frewer and Ulrich Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2007), 19–35.

  44. 44.

    Elkeles, “The German Debate,” 22–8.

  45. 45.

    Alfons Labisch, “From Traditional Individualism to Collective Professionalism: State, Patient, Compulsory Health Insurance and the Panel Doctor Question in Germany 1883–1931,” in Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, eds. Manberg Berg and Geoffrey Cocks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 18–34; Carl Havelange, “L’hôpital à la croisée des chemins: la question des malades payants,” Annales belges d’histoire des hôpitaux et de la santé publique 25, no. 1 (1987): 83–94; Keir Waddington, “Unsuitable Cases: The Debate over Outpatient Admissions, the Medical Profession and Late-Victorian London Hospitals,” Medical History 42, no. 1 (1998): 26–46.

  46. 46.

    See Chap. 3.

  47. 47.

    For example: Stéphane Louryan, “Un Portrait des Enseignants d’Anatomie humaine à l’Université Libre de Bruxelles,” Revue Médicale de Bruxelles 29, no. 1 (2008): 63–9; Carl Havelange, “Rupture ou Continuité? La Création de la Faculté de Médecine de l’Université de Liège en 1817,” in Regards sur 175 ans de Science à l’Université de Liège, 1817–1992, ed. Anne-Catherine Bernes (Liège: Université de Liège, 1992), 42–52.

  48. 48.

    Guido Everaert et al., “Het Anatomisch Instituut in het Bijlokehospitaal te Gent,” Stadsarcheologie 11, no. 2 (1997): 4–21; Chaké Matossian, ed., Art, Anatomie: trois siècles d’évolution des répresentations du corps (Brussels: Part de l’œil, 2007); Chloé Pirson, Corps à corps: les modèles anatomiques entre art et médecine (Paris: Mare et Martin, 2009).

  49. 49.

    Tatjana Buklijas, “Cultures of Death and Politics of Corpse Supply: Anatomy in Vienna, 1848–1914,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 3 (2008): 570–607, on p. 573.

  50. 50.

    For example: Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute; Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine; Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies; MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006); Idem, Possessing the Dead; Fiona Hutton, The Study of Anatomy in Britain, 1700–1900 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013).

  51. 51.

    Buklijas, “Cultures of Death,” 570–607.

  52. 52.

    Emmanuelle Godeau, “Lesprit de corps”: sexe et mort dans la formation des internes en médecine (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2007); Buklijas, “Cultures of Death,” 570–607; Idem, “Public Anatomies in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” Medicine Studies 2, no. 1 (2010): 71–92; Hieke Huistra, The Afterlife of the Leiden Anatomical Collections: Hands On, Hands Off (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).

  53. 53.

    Gita Deneckere, 1900: België op het breukvlak van twee eeuwen (Tielt: Lannoo, 2006), 19; Jane Block, ed., Belgium, the Golden Decades (1880–1914) (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).

  54. 54.

    Renaud Bardez, “La Faculté de médecine de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles: entre création, circulation et enseignement des savoirs, 1795–1914,” (PhD diss., Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2016), 172–3.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 190–254.

  56. 56.

    Charles Buls and Marcel Bots, Het dagboek van C. Buls (Ghent: Liberaal Archief, 1987), 103–4.

  57. 57.

    For example: Helen MacDonald, “Procuring Corpses: The English Anatomy Inspectorate, 1842 to 1858,” Medical History 53, no. 3 (2009): 379–96; Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine.

  58. 58.

    Hutton, The Study of Anatomy, 12.

  59. 59.

    Anneleen Arnout, Streets of Splendour: Shopping Culture and Spaces in a European Capital City (Brussels, 1830–1914) (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 9.

  60. 60.

    Eric Min, De eeuw van Brussel: biografie van een wereldstad, 1850–1914 (Amsterdam and Antwerpen: De Bezige Bij, 2015), 12–13.

  61. 61.

    Julie de Ganck, “De verzorging van het vrouwelijk geslacht: een maatschappelijke kwestie?,” Historica 16, no. 2 (2014): 9–16.

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  1. Department of History, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Tinne Claes

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Claes, T. (2019). Introduction. In: Corpses in Belgian Anatomy, 1860–1914. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20115-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20115-9_1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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