The Anatomy Inspector and the Government Corpse

Abstract

The nineteenth-century laws under which Australian medical schools obtained bodies for their students to dissect were deliberately vague on certain matters. Significantly, they failed to define the meaning of the term ‘anatomical examination’, the practice that they were regulating. Was this confined to dissecting a corpse for medical training, or did it bring within the realm of law the multitude of activities that medical men undertook on the dead? This article analyses an important 1903 South Australian government inquiry in which the meaning of this contentious term assumed centre stage, during a scandal that revealed exactly what was being done to the bodies of people whose deaths had b..