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Reviews
[A] fascinating story of society endeavoring to find an acceptable modern way to manage the aftermath of death... We now have a comprehensive and strong contextual account of the development of the modern inquest.
Burney presents a convincing and sophisticated argument.
The book promises to enthrall not only the medical historian and philosopher but also today's doctors contemplating their relationship with the rest of society.
This is an important book, deserving to be read by historians of politics and of the state as well as of medicine. It should stimulate research, for there is much still to be done on the activities of coroners, the political uses of inquests, and the changing political and jurisprudential role of expertise in the development of the modern state.
Ian A. Burney's book, Bodies of Evidence, examines how medical experts displaced the public in investigating suspicious deaths in England. Today, the displacement seems inevitable, the result of increased specialization, the rise of professional elites, and modern governments premised on a bureaucracy of experts. Bodies of Evidence, in a rich cultural mosaic, shows that the public ceded its role only reluctantly and uneasily.
[A] theoretically sophisticated study.
Burney has avoided a dry, institutional history of the inquest by weaving together abstract concepts of openness, democracy, progress, knowledge, power, the body, ritual, and space with concrete discussions of law, medicine, and politics.
[A] theoretically nuanced work offering rich and original insights.
This book provides an engaging and remarkably thorough history of neurology studded with bonbons of fascinating historical insights... Considering the current debates surrounding the provision of home care services and the roles to be played by informal care givers this book is timely and 'a must' for anyone interested in a true reflection on this topic.
As accessible as it is acute, Bodies of Evidence is a model of culturally and politically engaged, intellectually uncompromised historical scholarship.
Carefully researched and comprehensively referenced study.
An exciting book at the forefront of new interdisciplinary work in the social history of medicine.
Using stories of deaths in custody or under the surgeon's knife, statistical surveys of mortality and pestilence, the reputation of anaesthesia or forensic pathology, this remarkable account links histories of medicine, law, and politics. Burney brings these scenes back to life to show how issues of democratic control over knowledge and power were debated during the nineteenth century—and to motivate an informed examination of the origins of our own interests in reliable and publicly accountable knowledge.
Burney's account not only exposes the 'poor man's court' as an early nineteenth-century invention, but reveals it as one in which experts needed to be seen to act with a degree of transparency in order to gain public legitimacy. His analysis of the inquest beautifully illustrates fundamental tensions and ambiguities inherent in the formation of modern democratic states. Yet in mapping the boundaries that came to be drawn between popular and esoteric understandings of the inquest—indeed, the boundaries between the dead and the living—Burney sacrifices none of the intrinsic fascination of this most peculiar of English institutions. As accessible as it is acute, Bodies of Evidence is a model of modern historical scholarship.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
176
ISBN
9780801862403
Illustration Description
6 halftones, 2 line drawings
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Genealogy of the Popular Inquest
Chapter 2. Registers of Death: Inquests and the Regime of Vital Statistics
Chapter 3. From the Alehouse to the Courthouse
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Genealogy of the Popular Inquest
Chapter 2. Registers of Death: Inquests and the Regime of Vital Statistics
Chapter 3. From the Alehouse to the Courthouse: Bodies and the Recasting of Inquest Practice
Chapter 4. Telling Tales of the Dead: Inquests, Expertise, and the Postmortem Question
Chapter 5. Fatal Exposures: Anesthetic Death and the Limits of Public Inquiry
Epilogue
Notes
Index
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