Death investigation was a central aspect of forensic medicine. However, doctors struggled with uncertainty in defining and evaluating signs of death, at the same time as popular fears of premature burial abounded. Moreover, they faced considerable difficulties in distinguishing between homicides, suicides, and natural or accidental deaths and in determining the cause of death. Anxiety about insufficiently trained and incompetent practitioners who performed medicolegal duties that exceeded the limits of their knowledge and skills fueled demands for medicolegal reform. As medicolegal expertise played a more and more decisive role in criminal investigations and prosecutions, flawed forensic expertise became an increasingly salient problem that sparked ongoing debates about possible structural solutions.

From mid-1943 until late-1950, Eric Crozier was an essential asset to Britten’s industry. His work alongside director and radio producer Tyrone Guthrie not only introduced Crozier to the Old Vic in London, but to the BBC as well, where Guthrie also worked. Joan Cross invited Crozier and Guthrie to each direct two different productions at Sadler’s Wells in 1943. Crozier directed and produced Britten’s first two operas, Peter Grimes in 1945 at Sadler’s Wells, and The Rape of Lucretia in 1946 for the short-lived Glyndebourne English Opera Company. Crozier wrote the librettos for Albert Herring and the children’s entertainment Let’s Make an Opera (with its central opera, The Little Sweep), in addition to writing the text for the cantata Saint Nicolas, and with E. M. Forster, he was co-librettist for Billy Budd. Britten, Crozier, and designer John Piper founded the English Opera Group. The endeavour was based on ‘the Britten–Crozier doctrine’ that sought the group’s own autonomy and ultimately a home to produce such works. That home was largely realised in the founding of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts in 1948, for which Crozier was a founder and co-artistic director.

This chapter focuses on making new heritage that marks atrocity and transition. It analyses the creation of atrocity museums, particularly in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, to come to terms with a difficult past and re-narrate the nation moving into the future through artefacts. The chapter also looks at the Guatemalan National Police Archives and archives as a type of heritage that can be used to promote prosecution efforts in transitioning societies. The chapter examines underwater cultural heritage as well, and the regime of the UNESCO 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage in relation to human corpses, which are given stronger protections than human remains receive in other heritage regimes. The history behind this treaty reveals that the reason for these stronger protections has precisely to do with the bodies of fallen soldiers during the World Wars. Australia is an example of a country that, after initially rejecting the treaty, is now considering its ratification at the behest of civil society representing war veterans, thus becoming an example of how underwater heritage can also have an important role in transitional contexts.