Autopsies of violence: dissection and dissent in Nineteenth-Century China

Abstract

From the late eighteenth century until well after the creation of the Republic of China in 1912, when dissection was formally legalized, Western scientific examinations of the bodies of the Chinese dead were to be sources of recurrent tension and flashpoints of conflict. In 1894, during an epidemic of bubonic plague in Canton and Hong Kong, rumors circulated amongst the Chinese population of bodies gruesomely dissected by Western physicians. In Canton, two female missionaries, attacked by “a howling and maddened” crowd, were rescued at gunpoint with an uneasy truce maintained by the presence of a British gunboat offshore. Against this background of epidemic threat and social unrest, the paper examines the issues at stake in the promotion of postmortem procedures in colonial Hong Kong and Treaty-Port China. Linking these themes – the violence of dissection and the dissection of violence – is a concern with the development of anatomic pathology and the increasingly specialized and regulated spaces of scientific research that impinged on the dead: the mortuary and the laboratory, shut off from public view, where cadavers were stored and viscera examined. The paper concludes by considering what the institution of the postmortem in these Western enclaves in China can tell us about the medico-legal assumptions which underpinned the operations of the modern state.