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By Helen MacDonald, 220 pp, $25.
New Haven, Conn, Yale University Press, 2006.
ISBN-13 978-0-300-11699-1.

JAMA. 2007;297:1720-1721.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

As the title of this book makes clear, a single definitive history of dissection is simply not possible. It is a subject that will always be controversial, and so stories about its past will always be contested. MacDonald begins with a description of Gunther von Hagens' public dissection of a human corpse in November 2002. Von Hagens claimed that he was making anatomy democratic again, comparing his work with the public dissections performed in Britain before 1832. However, MacDonald points out, executed murderers were the subject of these public events, and dissection was part of their final punishment. As MacDonald makes clear, "anatomy has a disreputable past" (p 3).

The author has written a rather different history from those who have gone before, by tracing the life stories of some dissected corpses. While it may be necessary for anatomists to distance themselves from the subjects of dissection, MacDonald does her . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Helen Blackman, PhD, Reviewer
The Cardiff School of History and Archaeology
Cardiff University
Cardiff, United Kingdom
blackmanhj@cardiff.ac.uk