Recent medical and artistic scandals have drawn attention to the problems of storing and displaying human remains. This book places contemporary discussions into a much‐needed historical context by tracing the history of dead bodies in museums. It is concerned with the afterlives of diseased parts (in particular) in the medical marketplace, asking how they got to collections, what happened to them there, and who used them. Pathologists dismembered the dead body and preserved the fragments, whether by injection or by storage in fluid, fashioning them into material culture. Such body parts follo ... More

Recent medical and artistic scandals have drawn attention to the problems of storing and displaying human remains. This book places contemporary discussions into a much‐needed historical context by tracing the history of dead bodies in museums. It is concerned with the afterlives of diseased parts (in particular) in the medical marketplace, asking how they got to collections, what happened to them there, and who used them. Pathologists dismembered the dead body and preserved the fragments, whether by injection or by storage in fluid, fashioning them into material culture. Such body parts followed complex paths—harvested from hospital wards, given to prestigious institutions, or once again fragmented at auction. Human remains acquired new meanings as they were exchanged, the identities of anatomists and collectors obliterating that of the patient. Once in the museum, diseased specimens formed the major proportion of medical collections, re‐integrated to form physical maps of disease. Curators juxtaposed organic specimens with paintings, photographs, and models, and rendered them legible with extensive catalogues. Paper, wax, and text formed a series of overlapping systems that buttressed the morbid body. They were intended to standardize the educational experience that was the ostensible purpose of most of the museums, and yet visitors refused to be policed, responding powerfully, whether with wonder or disgust. This book is the story of these post‐mortem journeys in Britain in the long nineteenth century; an era of intense interest in pathological displays, from hospitals to fairgrounds, in which the museum emerged as the most important place for science and medicine, and the interior of the dead body was mapped out in unprecedented detail.