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"
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!