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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.
‘This is an exceptional book. Incredibly well researched, exhaustive and compelling, Hurren engages powerfully with the shifting ethics of anatomical ‘ownership’, identity and use and brings to the fore the complex history and status of the corpse. As Hurren demonstrates, these issues are as pressing now as they were in the last three hundred years or so.’
Julie-Marie Strange - Professor in Modern British History, Durham University
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