Bone collecting, body snatching, and the buying and selling of human remains have seldom been acknowledged as vital parts in the development of Western medicine. In this elegantly written account, the British medical systems' dependence upon the penal colony of Tasmania for anatomy training is explored. The lives of the poor who were routinely turned over to surgeons for study and the brisk trade in the remains of Aboriginal people are also investigated. Unlike other histories of medicine, this study looks at the way anatomy was intertwined with art, pleasure, punishment, and most...

Until 1832, when an Act of Parliament began to regulate the use of bodies for anatomy in Britain, public dissection was regularly-and legally-carried out on the bodies of murderers, and a shortage of cadavers gave rise to the infamous murders committed by Burke and Hare to supply dissection subjects to Dr. Robert Knox, the anatomist. This book tells the scandalous story of how medical men obtained the corpses upon which they worked before the use of human remains was regulated. Helen MacDonald looks particularly at the activities of British surgeons in nineteenth-century Van Diemen's Land, a...

One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20)
The instant New...

Before Helen Macdonald rose to international acclaim with her "beautiful and nearly feral" (New York Times) bestselling memoir H Is for Hawk, she wrote a collection of poetry, Shaler's Fish.
In robust, lyrical verse, Shaler's Fish roams both the outer and inner landscapes of the poet's universe, seamlessly fusing reflections on language, science, and literature, with the loamy environments of the natural worlds around her. Moving between the epicwar, history, art, myth, philosophyand the specificCNN, Ancient Rome, Auden, Merleau-PontyMacdonald examines with...