Narrative remains / Karen Ingham.

  • Ingham, Karen, 1959-
Date:
2009
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Narrative remains / Karen Ingham. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Revealing the patient’s voice in John Hunter’s collection, invoking identity to engender emotion, can therefore be seen as a political act. It is a way of highlighting the origins of the clinical gaze in order to deflect or refocus it, and to bring the modern patient back into the picture. But the fact that these identities are there to be recovered should make us pause. Why do we know their names - Richard Bulstrode, Mrs Adams, Marianne Harland and more? Was Thomas Thurlow - a Bishop! - subjected to the same indignity as the author Laurence Sterne: disinterred, ‘resurrected’, and spirited away, only to be revealed in the cold light of day on the dissector’s table? We know that John Hunter was, like his many contemporaries, dependent on an illicit trade in cadavers conducted by London’s ‘resurrectionists’ or grave- robbers. His case-books contain plenty of dispassionate accounts of dissections performed upon anonymous bodies, some secured through hospitals, others from work-houses or the gallows at Tyburn. ‘In 1759 I stripped the bones of an old woman that died in St George’s Hospital’, begins one such record, ‘I knew nothing of her history’. Yet his notes also include many details of patients with whom Hunter was more familiar: people of rank, of wealth, and of power, whose stories are preserved, and whose own voices can be heard in the records of their final illnesses. Hunter’s knife cut through the social and economic divides of Georgian society, bringing together clerics and criminals, politicians and paupers, merchants and tradesmen. In an essay on post- mortems in Britain in the 17th-century, David Harley has argued, pace Foucault, that such histories are evidence of a more multivalent political economy, in which patients, rather than practitioners, often held sway. If, as Norman Jewson has suggested, the 18th-century witnessed the disappearance of the ‘sick man’ from medical practice, then Hunter’s case- books suggest that this was a gradual process, and one that was the result of a careful process of negotiation, rather
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