Hidden Histories of the Dead

This discipline-redefining study of secretive British medical research cultures after World War Two retraces the harvesting and recycling of bodies and body-parts for tissue culture and pathology labs, transplantation surgery facilities, brain banks, and dissection teaching spaces between 1945 and 2000. This title is also available as Open Access.

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In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the legal ambiguities of a lack of fully-informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second-place to the economics of the national and international commodification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as Open Access.