PMID: 11639292Apr 1, 1994Paper

Political post-mortems and morbid anatomy in seventeenth-century England

Social History of Medicine : the Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine
D N Harley

Abstract

Michel Foucault argued that the development of morbid anatomy, which he located in late eighteenth-century France, led to a great increase in the power of doctors over patients. The use of autopsy findings to confirm the cause of death and to provide information for systematic pathology had a prior history, however. When introduced into England, in the seventeenth century, the practice was already well established in Europe, notably in connection with the enbalming of the French kings. Several highly controversial autopsies, conducted on royalty and politicians, publicized the procedure and helped to make it socially acceptable. English anatomists were then able to draw on the results of autopsies conducted on their patients to correlate normal anatomy with the post-mortem signs. Most patients did not feel threatened by this procedure because it was undertaken privately and with consent, as a final act of clinical care. English physicians abandoned autopsies to the surgeons towards the end of the century in pursuit of a more genteel style of self-presentation. The connection between power and morbid anatomy seems to arise not from the practice of autopsy itself but from the impersonal authority of late eighteenth-century hospit...Continue Reading

Citations

Apr 5, 2005·Journal of the History of the Neurosciences·Cagatay Ustun, Cagatay Uston
Oct 27, 2010·The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh·I M L Donaldson
Sep 12, 2018·Clinical Anatomy : Official Journal of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists & the British Association of Clinical Anatomists·James R Wright
Jan 28, 2021·Cancers·Tamsin Joy RobbCherie Blenkiron

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