Elizabeth T. Hurren – författare

The Pauper Body in England and Wales 1750 to 1914 is based on a unique collection of 8 million words of pauper letters. It features fascinating body biographies of ordinary people living in deepest poverty who used their voices to secure welfare support. The Old and New Poor Law authorities often tried, and frequently failed, to label the poorest of people 'Nobodies'.The bodies of paupers were branded as the contaminated body; those who experienced regular sexual abuse; and people medically certified as mentally ill. Paupers in writing resisted being characterised as a nameless broken body, campaigning for official recognition. In three parts, Elizabeth T. Hurren reveals a surprising range of relatable human stories and explores how pauper bodies retain trauma, weathered by poverty and stress. The chapters contain a mosaic of welfare lessons that endure, despite their historical distance. A striking feature of the millions of body biographies are their familiar physical symptoms and psychological predicaments. Hurren also traces the historic migration of unwanted immigrants who travelled thousands of nautical miles to try to re-create community and belonging.

A fresh look at the complex question of outdoor poor relief in the nineteenth century.The consequences of extreme poverty were a grim reality for all too many people in Victorian England. The various poor laws implemented to try to deal with it contained a number of controversial measures, one of the most radical and unpopular being the crusade against outdoor relief, during which central government sought to halt all welfare payments at home.Via a close case study of Brixworth union in Northamptonshire, which offers an unusually richcorpus of primary material and evidence, the author looks at what happened to those impoverished men and women who struggled to live independently in a world-without-welfare outside the workhouse. She retraces the experiences ofelderly paupers evicted from almshouses, of the children of the aged poor prosecuted for parental maintenance, of dying paupers who were refused medical care in their homes, and of women begging for funeral costs in an attempt toprevent the bodies of their loved ones being taken for dissection by anatomists. She then shows how increasing democratisation gave the labouring poor the means to win control of the poor law.ELIZABETH T. HURREN is a Reader in the Medical Humanities, University of Leicester.

In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the legal ambiguities of a lack of fully-informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second-place to the economics of the national and international commodification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as Open Access.

In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the legal ambiguities of a lack of fully-informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second-place to the economics of the national and international commodification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as Open Access.