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Professor Joanna Bourke‌‌‌‌

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Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and Fellow of the British Academy. She is the prize-winning author of thirteen books, including histories on modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, what it means to be human, death and dying, and rape. Most recently, she has published The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (OUP) and Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play are Invading our Lives (Virago). She is currently writing the history of Birkbeck for its bicentenary and is the Principal Investigator on a Wellcome Trust funded project entitled “Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry”.

Carved into the Body: Forensic Science, Truth, and the Female Corpse

Since the late nineteenth century, forensic science has become one of the dominant languages to describe, interpret, and give meaning to the dead body. As a scientific culture, it has not simply ‘inscribed’ its text on a ‘natural’ or pre-social body, but has collaborated in the creation of physiological bodies and metaphoric systems. In this paper, I focus on attempts by forensic scientists to ‘read’ the bodies of women who had been subjected to extreme violence. The belief that forensic scientists could generate objective truth from assessing and measuring physical markers changed dramatically over the centuries. Forensic assessments of the physiological body reiterated its constructed rather than intrinsic nature, periodically throwing the science into crisis mode.