Output details

Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor

This 125000-word/380pp monograph arises from analysis of 20000 pauper life-histories collected over 7 years research in 20 UK archives. The variety, scope, and number of sources investigated is unusually broad and required extensive record-linkage work (records of anatomists, coroners, parishes, poor law, burial, pauper letters) producing a well-founded analysis of financial transactions and human stories that lay behind the ‘business of anatomy’. A novel methodology was also developed, using medical school burial records, to trace the traffic in corpses of the poor for medical research in 19th-century England. The project occupied c.50% of Hurren's research time in the REF period.