Death in Beijing : murder and forensic science in Republican China / Daniel Asen, Rutgers University--Newark.

  • Asen, Daniel S.
Date:
2016
  • Books

About this work

Description

"In this innovative and engaging history of homicide investigation in Republican Beijing, Daniel Asen explores the transformation of ideas about death in China in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, those who died violently or under suspicious circumstances constituted a particularly important population of the dead, subject to new claims by police, legal and medical professionals, and a newspaper industry intent on covering urban fatality in sensational detail. Asen examines the process through which imperial China's old tradition of forensic science came to serve the needs of a changing state and society under these dramatically new circumstances. This is a story of the unexpected outcomes and contingencies of modernity, presenting new perspectives on China's transition from empire to modern nation state, competing visions of science and expertise, and the ways in which the meanings of death and dead bodies changed amid China's modern transformation"-- Provided by publisher.

Publication/Creation

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Physical description

ix, 258 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

1. Suspicious deaths and city life in Republican Beijing -- 2. On the case with the Beijing procuracy -- 3. Disputed forensics and skeletal remains -- 4. Publicity, professionals, and the cause of forensic reform -- 5. Professional politics of a crime scene -- 6. Dissection and its discontents -- 7. Legal medicine during the Nanjing decade -- Conclusion: A history of forensic modernity -- Glossary.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    KH.251.AA9
    Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9781107126060
  • 1107126061