Awards

• Short-listed for Ernest Scott Prize for History 2006
• Shortlisted for Ernest Scott Prize for History 2006.

Overview

What should happen to the dead? Bone collecting, body snatching and the politics of the trade in human remains is a gothic tale that still hauts contemporary life. Human Remains tells the scandalous story of how medical men obtained the corpses upon which they worked before anatomy was regulated in Australia and Britain. Moving back and forth between Britain and the island penal colony of Tasmania, the book examines an era when convicted murderers received the double sentence of both death and dissection. The poor who died in hospital were routinely turned over to the surgeons for study, and men traded in human remains, including those of Aboriginal people.

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9780522851571

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Helen MacDonald is an award-winning historian and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. She is currently investigating how anatomy came to be regulated in the Australian penal colonies, and exploring the links between medical and non-medical uses of the dead from the nineteenth century to the present.

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