RESUMEN
When stillbirth registration became mandatory in England and Wales in 1926, it was not to amass statistics in the service of public health. Instead, it was part of broader anxieties that victims of infanticide were being disposed of under the guise of having been stillborn. But because it necessitated distinguishing between the living and the dead, the legislation that introduced stillbirth registration generated debate about the definition of life itself. This focused both on what counted as a sign of life and on questions about the viability of preterm infants. These contentious disputes had serious repercussions for the treatment of premature births well into the twentieth century. Significantly, they also underscore that what classifies a person as dead or alive is never self-evident. Instead, the state's authorized definition of life is under permanent negotiation as it is always mobilized in the service of particular regimes of power.
Asunto(s)
Legislación Médica/historia , Nacimiento Prematuro/historia , Mortinato , Estadísticas Vitales , Inglaterra , Historia del Siglo XX , Humanos , Vida , GalesRESUMEN
In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the British government expanded its social programs, and private charities and co-operative associations began to offer more benefits, birth certificates became essential to the bureaucratic process of establishing both age and identity. But every time a birth certificate was produced, it made the private circumstances of an individual's birth public knowledge. For those born out of wedlock, handing over these certificates was often stigmatizing at a time when illegitimacy remained for many a shameful family secret. When the government finally introduced an abbreviated birth certificate in 1947, which documented name, sex, and birth date without reference to parentage, they were responding to long-standing concerns both within and beyond the state bureaucracy about the tension inherent in keeping public records about people's private lives. The emergence of the short form birth certificate is thus part of a much larger human story that can help us to map significant shifts in the relationship between the individual citizen and the modern state in the information age.
Asunto(s)
Certificado de Nacimiento/historia , Ilegitimidad/historia , Historia del Siglo XX , Humanos , Reino UnidoRESUMEN
In 2002, Gunther von Hagens's display of plastinated corpses opened in London. Although the public was fascinated by Body Worlds, the media largely castigated the exhibition by dismissing it as a resuscitated Victorian freak show. By using the freak show analogy, the British press expressed their moral objection to this type of bodily display. But Body Worlds and nineteenth-century displays of human anomalies were linked in more complex and telling ways as both attempted to be simultaneously entertaining and educational. This essay argues that these forms of corporeal exhibitionism are both examples of the dynamic relationship between the popular and professional cultures of the body that we often erroneously think of as separate and discrete. By reading Body Worlds against the Victorian freak show, I seek to generate a fuller understanding of the historical and enduring relationship between exhibitionary culture and the discourses of science, and thus to argue that the scientific and the spectacular have been, and clearly continue to be, symbiotic modes of generating bodily knowledge.