‘The most offensive thing in the world’? Post mortems in private houses in the 19th and 20th centuries

This seminar explores the material and sensory culture of postmortems undertaken in private, non-clinical, spaces. To undertake such a procedure in a domestic setting – usually due to a lack of local mortuary facilities – required innovation on the part of the practitioner. Kitchen tables, doors, and beds were put to use as tables, and household rags and sheets were torn up to use as swabs. Transforming the home into an ad hoc space of pathological examination necessitated both the subversion of domestic material culture and the careful masking of that subversion: choosing a nondescript bag large enough to carry instruments and specimens, for example, or ensuring that no odours lingered in the house after the procedure. 

By exploring such practices, I argue that the historiography of death in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century has so far overlooked the role of private postmortems in configuring contemporary attitudes towards, and knowledge about, pathological examination. How did families understand and experience such procedures? With experiences of death becoming increasingly medicalized from the late 20th century, the talk will also consider how knowledge of postmortem and pathological practice in the present day may impact our experiences of death and mourning.

The IHR has kindly agreed to fund travel expenses of up to £120 to support the attendance of up to 3 postgraduate or early career researchers. The University of Wolverhampton will also provide a lunch voucher. To apply, please email a short statement outlining the relevance of this topic to your area of research and how the funding will support your academic activities to Dr Eamonn O’Kane at E.OKane@wlv.ac.uk.

Dr Jennifer Wallis is Senior Teaching Fellow in Medical Humanities and Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College London. Before this she was Lecturer in Cultural and Intellectual History at Queen Mary University of London, and a postdoctoral researcher on the ‘Diseases of Modern Life’ project based at the University of Oxford. Her publications include Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and the co-authored volume Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).