Post Humans Beyond the Slab: A Fable

Date: 18 October, Saturday | Time: 13:00 - 14:00 | Venue: Academia Auditorium

Speakers: Prof Brian Hurwitz & Prof Ruth Richardson

Programme Description: 
A short story appeared in an anonymous pamphlet in London in 1893. It sold for one shilling. It recounts a social gathering in full swing one New Year’s Eve. The corpses in a London medical school have come back to life and are socialising in the dissecting room when a medical student stumbles into their midst. He is recognised and welcomed, initially with some reserve, until he proves able to enter into the spirit of the occasion. The narrative’s surreal, post-humanist perspective emerges through the affective and moral agency of the dead. The pamphlet anticipates some of the relational values with which dissection will be endowed in the late twentieth century. But it challenges the notion that corpses should be considered ‘silent teachers’ of human anatomy, who inhabit the insensitive, asocial realm of the dead. The corpses emerge as the vital co-producers and moral guardians of anatomical knowledge, who rightfully place demands on their dissectors.