A wide-ranging examination of the historical process of negotiating
expert authority in the public realm.
In Bodies of Evidence, Ian Burney offers an important reinterpretation
of the role of the scientific expert in the modern democratic state. At
the core of this study lies the coroner's inquest--the ancient tribunal
in English law held to account for cases of unexplained death. During
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, representatives of
"progressive" medical science waged a determined campaign to align the
methodology of the inquest with a medical model of investigation and
explanation. Yet at the same time the inquest was framed within a second
powerful and innovative discourse, one based on an appeal to the inquest
as a time-honored bulwark of English popular liberties. Bodies of
Evidence takes these parallel visions of the inquest as the point of
departure for a wide-ranging examination of the historical process of
negotiating expert authority in the public realm.
By insisting on the dynamic interplay between the medical and political
visions of the inquest, Burney calls into question many of the basic
assumptions about the rise of science as a model for socially
authoritative knowledge. Among this study's central and innovative
claims is that traditional narratives of the rise of expertise in the
nineteenth century obscure the tension between the needs of modern
governance on the one hand and the politics of expanding popular
participation on the other. Along the way, Bodies of Evidence
elegantly evokes the workings of one of the more curious institutions of
English civil society, an institution whose somber duties before death
were performed with surprising (and occasionally unnerving) vitality.
Bringing the concerns of the cultural historian to bear on the histories
of medicine and the law and integrating the perspectives of the "new"
political history and the history and sociology of scientific knowledge,
Bodies of Evidence is a theoretically nuanced and empirically rich
account that will have a genuinely cross-disciplinary appeal.
"It is not surprising that spokesmen for an emerging medicolegal
community waged a sustained campaign to frame the inquest first and
foremost as a tool of applied medical inquiry. But the modern inquest
was simultaneously framed within a dynamic contemporary discourse of
'historical' popular liberties. The mere fact of its having survived
from at least the twelfth century (some claimed for it an earlier, Saxon
pedigree) lent the inquest the trappings of an exemplary embodiment of
the 'genius of English reform.'"--from Bodies of Evidence
