Making the Body Speak: Anatomy, Autopsy and Testimony in Early America, 1639-1790

Abstract

Making the Body Speak considers how the voices of deceased people were extracted, interpreted, or stifled through forensic means, and how such practices formed the basis of an autoptic culture of testimonial retrieval in early America and the larger Atlantic world. My study takes place at the intersection of literary studies, religious studies, the history of medicine and the history of law. Reading inquest reports, print accounts, anatomy lectures, and execution sermons, I show that early Americans perceived postmortem investigations as collaborative acts between the bodies of the dead and their would-be interrogators, and that autoptic practices illuminate early American conceptions of the deceased body as subject, object, and witness.