Shot at dawn in the Great War: Re-evaluating justice in the case of Harry Farr. By Floris Tomasini
Today’s post looks at a re-evaluation of justice in an emblematic case study; Harry Farr who was shot for cowardice during the Great War. The historical facts of the case are taken and paraphrased from Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilsons book Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War (2002). The […]
The Diary of a Dissection: Jane Jamieson and the Newcastle Barber Surgeons. By Patrick Low
The recent furore in France, over the wearing of Burkinis, has shone a new light on an age-old societal problem; the female body. Nowhere was the shock of a woman’s form greater than on the c18th and c19th anatomists’ slab. The prospect of total exposure to the eyes of an uncaring crowd and the […]
Dismemberment in Victorian London: The Thames Torso Murders. By Shane McCorristine
One of the most disturbing unsolved murder mysteries in London’s history began on the morning of 5 September 1873 when a Thames policeman rowing on the river found the left quarter of a woman’s torso in some mud off Battersea waterworks. On the same day other policemen found the right side of a […]
A Historical Long View of Posthumous Harm: Comparing organ snatching to body-snatching. By Floris Tomasini
Improper Procurement and Retention Taking organs of dead children without parental permission at Alder Hey is a practice The Economist (2001) dubbed the ‘return of the body-snatchers’. There is a historical affinity between the practice of body-snatching in the Georgian period and ‘organ snatching’ at Alder Hey some two hundred or so years […]
The Bloody Business of the Bloody Code: Dissecting the Criminal Corpse. By Elizabeth Hurren
Imagine hearing local gossip that a notorious murderer was about to be executed, and that everyone in the vicinity of a homicide was planning to turn out to see the violent culprit punished in Georgian England. Getting to the gallows to secure a good spot would mean having to take an unpaid half-day off […]
The Geography of the Criminal Corpse: Magic, therapies and bodily pieces across Europe. By Francesca Matteoni
I have been involved in the first two years of the project as a postdoctoral researcher working on the medico-magical employment of the criminal corpse’s pieces: hands, fingers, blood, corporeal fragments, but even those objects who had a direct contact with the body, such as the rope, or more intangible, mysterious substances like the […]
What and When is Death? By Floris Tomasini
In this blog post I’d like to talk about two forms of death, biological and social death, through the conceptual lens of personal identity. This deceptively simple distinction informs a lot of my subsequent conceptual analysis about the harm and redemption of death and dying. It also lays one of the foundation stones for […]
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