Nobodyâs dead. This phrase, the title of this book, assumes multiple meanings. To start with, it refers to an absence of ownership or belonging with regard to the corpse. The particular matter of the dead body seems to be both indefinable and indeterminate: a conceptual and social no manâs land. When death occurs, the body ceases to be a subject, a person, in the strict sense of the word. And yet, the enduring referential relationship to the deceased still prevents the corpse from fully becoming an ownable thing: even dead, the body cannot wholly belong to someone else.
Nineteenth-century anatomists took advantage of this uncertain destiny of the dead body. They argued that corpses could be used in the name of science because they did not belong to anybody. Laws stated that anatomists could use the bodies of those who died in state-funded institutions unless first claimed by their relatives, a course of action that implied the family then took on the costs of burial. The unclaimed dead, mostly meaning the poor, could be used for medical education and research because nobody had declared ownership over them. Since they were nobodyâs, and often nobodies in the pejorative sense of the word, their bodies ended up on the dissecting table.
The title of this book also points at the continued subjectivity and agency of the dead. Nobody is dead, because the deceased live on in the memories and actions of the ones they leave behind. Dying does not fix our identities: through the thoughts and practices of those who survive us, we can still change after death. Human remains can shift both shapes and meanings as a result of the relations we maintain with them. The corpse is therefore seldom a passive object. Because the deceased continues to be present in the flesh, the dead body is more than just matter .
This ambivalence of the corpse sometimes tied the hands of anatomists. In 1866, for example, a certain Paul drew his last breath in the hospital of St. Pierre in Brussels. He was a painter, 34 years old. The head physician of the hospital Edouard Van den Corput wanted to perform an autopsy because he was unsure about the cause of death. Unfortunately for him, Paulâs relatives claimed his body, thereby prohibiting dissection. They wanted to pay their last respects. The presence of the coffin (typically an open coffin) during the funeral service was important to them because they were Roman Catholics . They believed that they could improve the afterlife of Paul by praying over his remains and by letting a priest bless his body. After the funeral service, they would guide his coffin to the cemetery.1
Van den Corput was not easily discouraged. He thought that a body buried was a body wasted, especially if interesting scientific facts awaited discovery in its hidden depths. Much like other anatomists in Brussels, he saw the hospital as âan inexhaustible mine of pathological richesâ. It was his job to make sure that these resources âwere scrupulously and largely exploitedâ.2 Van den Corput descended the stairs to the morgue, where the body was stored until burial. He opened the lid of the coffin and took off Paulâs shirt for examination. He found an unusual swelling at the left side of the body and decided to make an incision. When he put his finger in, he felt that the spleen was abnormally voluminous. He widened the incision and removed the organ. Then he closed the wound, washed the body, put Paulâs shirt back on and placed the lid back on the coffin. When Van den Corput presented the spleen at a scientific society a few days later, he apologised because he had not been able to perform a more elaborate examination. He explained to his colleagues that âthe subject was claimed by his familyâ. âThe autopsy had to happen secretlyâ, while âthe corpse was already lying in the coffinâ.3
One could argue that Van den Corput treated Paul as a thing. He went to the morgue in order to get his hands on a pathological object, regardless of the wishes of the family. When he later presented the spleen to his colleagues, he did not mention Paulâs full name. This interpretation would fit with the views of many historians of anatomy, who have implicitly and explicitly described nineteenth-century anatomical practices as instances of objectification. According to the dominant historical narrative, nineteenth-century anatomists eradicated the humanness of the corpse: they turned social subjects into scientific objects. In the case of Van den Corput, however, such a reading offers only half the story. If he had not taken into consideration that Paul was a man with a loving family, he would have performed a more elaborate autopsy. He would not have cared about stitching up the wound.
The case of Paulâs spleen is not unique. As the nineteenth century progressed, so this book argues, anatomists in Brussels increasingly took into account the emotionally charged nature of their research âmaterialâ. This shift was grounded in broader developments happening in the city. The dead began to occupy an important place in the political landscape of Brussels from the 1860s onwards. The Liberal city council wanted to take charge of burials, which had traditionally been under the control of the Roman Catholic Church. On the one hand, churchyards were replaced with communal cemeteries, an evolution that had a profound impact on the culture of death. On the other, civil burials (burials without Catholic ceremony) became a means to express and strengthen anticlericalism as a political force. The Church strongly opposed these changes. As a consequence of these heightened ideological tensions, the âindecentâ burial of hospital patients increasingly came into view. Due to the fact that their burial rituals largely revolved around the presence of an open coffin, Roman Catholics began to use the image of the dissected pauper as a critique of the cityâs new burial policy.
In the 1880s, other evolutions began to force anatomists to change their habits. Brussels went through an unruly period. The industrialised city, with a large class of working poor, became the heart of social protest in Belgium. A bitter struggle for electoral reform went hand in hand with strikes and demonstrations for better working conditions. In an effort to encourage class consciousness, the emergent Socialist movement drew attention to the unequal treatment of the proletariat in public institutions, including hospitals. Involuntary dissection became a symbol of the unfair treatment of the poor. This critique further gained credibility when the social status of hospital patients changed. Better-off patients started to enter hospital wards, mostly in search of safer surgery. Since these paying patients could choose their own treatment and did not have to participate in medical education or research, the true cost of a hospital stay became tangible and easy to understand for the poor. Protest against involuntary dissection surged. The use of the bodies of the poor, against their wishes, became even harder to justify when consent was introduced as a legal principle in 1889.
The compromise of Van den Corput was exceptional in 1866. At that time, all hospital patients were poor. Relatives were mostly unable to claim the bodies of their deceased loved ones because of a lack of financial means. Since poverty in general was regarded as a sin, there was not a lot of compassion for the dead poor: protests against their involuntary dissection were virtually non-existent. Yet by the end of the century, anatomists had to walk a tightrope to get their hands on dead bodies. Different stakeholders entered the field: families, burial societies, clergy, social reform movements, even the dead themselves. To make matters worse, the discipline of anatomy lost prestige, giving medical scientists from other disciplines room to claim their fair share of cadavers, too. To whom did the body belong? Briefly put, that question became a lot more complex.
This book therefore is as much about anatomists as it is about dead bodies and the social, cultural and ethical sensitivities that surround them. It is a cultural history of anatomy, which systematically points at interconnections between different views of the corpse and the practices conducted in anatomical theatres, more specifically in Brussels from approximately 1860 until 1914. The claims of this book, however, go beyond the specifics of this metropolitan case. As many of the events transforming anatomy in Brussels were part of broader developments, this study offers a starting point for research on the organisation and transformation of anatomy across continental Europe in the lesser-studied second half of the nineteenth century.
Most importantly, this book reassesses and questions previous readings of anatomy as objectification. Apart from a few notable exceptions, to which I return in the next pages, historians have interpreted nineteenth-century anatomical practices as practices of objectification, in which the human body was transformed from a subject to an object. By following the sometimes long and complex journeys of human remainsâsuch as Paulâs spleenâfrom acquisition to disposal, this study sheds light on a conflicting evolution in anatomy, one in which the body could retain or regain its subjectivity and individuality. Taken together, the pages of this book reveal that anatomists in Brussels and beyond increasingly reconciled their interests with the meanings the corpse accrued as the remainder of a person.
1 The Corpse as Object and Subject
Working primarily within Anglo-American fields of study, historians have tended to conceptualise anatomy as an archetype of objectification for various reasons. The research of Ruth Richardson , whose book Death, Dissection and the Destitute (first published in 1987) established the history of anatomy as a fully fledged field of research, was among the earliest to link the practice of anatomy to the commodification of the corpse. Richardson posited that the growing importance of dissection in early nineteenth-century Britain transformed dead bodies, once persons, into objects with a market value. In her words, the body became a âtoken of exchange, subject to commercial dealingâ.4 Since then many historians have echoed this argument, drawing attention to the lucrative traffic of both dead bodies (for sale as a whole, in pieces or by the inch) and anatomical specimens.5 Other studies have shown that, once acquired, anatomical corpses and their parts served various ends, ranging from public enlightenment to medical teaching or research.6 In su...