| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Helen MacDonald. Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 220. $35.00.

Helen MacDonald's book is part of a growing literature on the history of "the uses of the dead to the living," that Benthamite euphemism for anatomical dissection. But unlike previous studies, MacDonald situates the subjects of scientific scrutiny at the center of her narrative, turning what were called "things" (p. 40) by those who wielded the lancet into people with histories and stories of their own to tell. Their narratives are above all else colonial as the case studies in this book are drawn from the British territory known as Van Diemen's Land or Tasmania. By focusing on the peripheral space of empire, MacDonald is attempting not merely to add to the history of the acquisition and study of human remains by including another site for these activities. Rather, she is also trying to rethink the ways in which scholars have approached the topic by insisting that the history of convicts and aboriginal peoples, and the interplay between colonial and metropolitan medical men and anthropologists, was central to the emergence of the study of the human body in the nineteenth century.

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