Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse. (360G-Wellcome-095904_Z_11_Z)

This programme brings together six interdisciplinary research strands overseen by four senior scholars with proven track records that will together produce a core history of the use and power of the criminal corpse between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. The criminal corpse featured prominently in popular culture, as well as science, civic life, and medico-legal productions, and its power was harnessed for the purposes of negotiating social relationships of class, the powe r of medical men and the judiciary, and in the creation of popular and scientific medicine. Such bodies were historically significant sites of overlapping, competing, and often contradictory, understandings of human anatomy, criminal justice, popular medicine, and the social geography of the body. A broad interdisciplinary study of the use, meanings and power of the criminal corpse in Britain can be used as a vehicle for methodological and substantive advances in approaches to the wider history of the body. Additional context comes from studies of the criminal corpse in the popular imagination and its role in the development of normative ethics. An ambitious list of academic and popular outputs, including books articles and an online exhibition, ensures value for money.