'A Good, Firm Table': The History of Post-Mortems in Domestic Spaces

***Doors open 7pm for a 7:30 start***

In an age before dedicated mortuary spaces were widely available, doctors and pathologists often had to make do with other locations, from schoolrooms to pubs. Throughout the 19th and into the mid 20th century, many rural GPs were tasked with performing postmortems for the coroner in cases of sudden or suspicious death. Some of these doctors found themselves improvising with the contents of ordinary domestic households: dining tables, bowls, towels, and buckets. What did this mean for families, and for the professional status of both GPs and pathologists? In this talk, medical historian Dr Jennifer Wallis reveals the ‘domestic postmortem’ to be a practice that can tell us a great deal about the history of pathology, the emotional and sensory experiences of death, the tensions between rural and urban medicine, and the increasingly proscribed role of the GP in the 20th century.

Dr Jennifer Wallis is a Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine, and Senior Teaching Fellow in Medical Humanities, at Imperial College London. Her publications include Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices (Palgrave, 2017) and the co-edited volume Sources in the History of Psychiatry, from 1800 to the Present (Routledge, 2022).

This talk is part of National Pathology Week, 2025

The doors open at 7pm for a 7:30 start. Wine and non-alcoholic drinks, as well as nibbles, are included in the ticket price. There's plenty of time to browse the collection before and after Jenny's talk.

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