Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Cultural Politics of Anatomy and the Problem of Death, Dissection, and Embodiment in 19th-Century America

博士论文研究：“解剖学的文化政治和死亡、解剖和具体化的问题”本研究通过阐明阶级、性别和种族在医疗决策以及医学伦理立法中的地位，将生理学、解剖学和医学教育的正式历史纳入更广泛的社会和文化史领域。更具体地说，它展示了医生如何利用解剖学来建立对生者和死者的重要身份和权威，以及妇女、穷人、非正统的治疗师和激进分子如何质疑这种权威，并将解剖学用于自己的目的。解剖是一种产生知识的有力方法，也是一种强有力的隐喻。解剖学家跨越了生与死的界限，切开身体，把它分解成几个部分，然后用道德评论来框定它。解剖的尸体被用来证明社会分类是自然的，并赋予该职业一种认识论上的特权地位。但解剖依赖于没收尸体。随着需求的增长，尸体黑市蓬勃发展，随之而来的是关于死者性质和处置的法律、社会和哲学冲突。这些问题在讲坛和演讲厅里进行了辩论，在针对医学院的骚乱中进行了斗争，并在法院和立法机构中作出了决定，深刻地影响了死亡实践以及尸体的法律和道德地位。

SBR-9520710 Doctoral Dissertation Research: "The Cultural Politics of Anatomy and the Problem of Death, Dissection, and Embodiment" This study integrates the formal history of physiology, anatomy, and medical education into the broader field of social and cultural history by illuminating the place of class, gender, and race in medical decision-making as well as in legislation concerning ethics in medicine. More particularly, it shows how physicians used anatomy to develop a vital identity and authority over both the living and the dead -- and how women, the poor, unorthodox healers, and radicals contested that authority and appropriated anatomy for their own purposes. Dissection was a potent method of producing knowledge but also a powerful metaphor. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to parts, and framed it with moral commentary. The dissected body was used to demonstrate that social categories were natural and conferred an epistemologically privileged status upon the profession. But dissection depended upon confiscation of the dead. As demand grew, black-markets in bodies flourished, and with them legal, social, and philosophical clashes over the nature and disposition of the dead. These issues were debated in pulpits and lecture halls, fought out in riots against medical schools, and decided in courts and legislatures, profoundly affecting death practices, and the legal and moral status of the body.