Encountering the Dead

The author's best-known book, Speaking for the Dead: The Human Body in Biology and Medicine, published in 2009, has been used extensively by those looking for an overview of issues around the dead human body (including lawyers involved in cases about the retention of organs and body parts). Over the past 40 years many new ethical issues have arisen. Written from a personal perspective this book aims to present an overview of the issues in an accessible manner for anatomists, other health educators, biomedical scientists, biological anthropologists, and legal scholars. References are kept to a minimum. The relatively short chapters include coverage of unethical travesties of the Nazi era, and the revolution in public anatomy created by the Body Worlds public exhibitions of dissected human bodies. The growing appreciation of ethical developments by anatomists from Medieval times to the present is highlighted and the consequences for present-day ethical expectations are assessed.