2025/11/24 by Joshua Shaw · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #Law in Society and Culture #History of Medicine Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/13576275.2025.2586001
Without the authority of legislation in the United Kingdom, some bequeathed their bodies to physicians, surgeons and apothecaries to dissect and create anatomical specimens in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Those individuals included the legal and political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who was publicly dissected and whose skeleton and preserved head were used to prepare the ‘Auto-Icon’. Other dissections were publicised in newsprints and periodicals, often alongside commentary on the prejudice against dissection and anatomy and calls for anatomy legislation. Such bequests attempted to interface with English law generally and anatomy law specifically, but how they did so and with what effect are less obvious. Accordingly, the author undertakes the study of body bequests before legislation, so to identify and analyse their significance to the law’s conception of what could be done with or to a human corpse. He argues that body bequests relied on a kind of legal somatics or somatechnics in the use of the body, through which alternate imaginaries of the corpse, and attendant normative understandings, were visualised and instituted. By doing so, testators, executors and dissectors sought to affirm the law as they thought it should be, by acting as if it already were the law.