Hidden Histories of the Dead : Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research

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.

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.