Kicking the corpse: why the mutilation of dead bodies repulses us--or should.(Culture Watch)(Column)

WHY do we find the mutilation of bodies, such as that recently perpetrated by the jubilant crowds in Fallujah upon the four Americans they had killed, so deeply repellent, worse even than the murder itself? A rationalist would have difficulty explaining the strength of this feeling, though he would nevertheless share it with people whom he regarded as irrational.

Murder, after all, is supposedly the worst crime you can commit: and the rationalist should argue that, having deprived a man of his life, there is no further harm you can do him since he has ceased to exist as a possible subject of harm. It isn't a question of upsetting the victim's relatives, either, for the mutilation would be just as repellent if the man were entirely alone, without a friend or relative in the world to be upset by it. The mutilation of the body of a dead tramp would be just as terrible as that of a dead king. The act itself is what repels, irrespective of who, if anyone, suffers by it.

In England in the 18th century, before the Anatomy Act was passed, there was a shortage of bodies from which the surgeons might learn anatomy by dissection. The only bodies they were permitted by law to dissect were those of criminals who had been hanged, at best an inadequate and uncertain supply of cadavers; and to be anatomized was popularly regarded as a far worse punishment than execution itself. Hogarth's Four Stages of Cruelty, published in 1751, treated the dissection of the miscreant in Surgeon's Hall as the ultimate nemesis: Punishment could not go further or be more extreme. The crowds at public executions, which had no objection at all to the executions themselves, often tried violently to prevent the body of a hanged man from falling into the hands of the surgeons. For them, this was a desecration that no one, however wicked he had been during life, could possibly deserve.

In the days before computerized anatomy lessons, medical students were taken to the dissection room on their first day in medical school. This violation of their natural feelings was to them what the first two weeks of insult and humiliation is to Marines: a rite of passage and an intimation that, henceforth, they were not as other men and women are, but had a special ethic of their own. The fact of having desecrated a human body was testimony to the seriousness of this ethic; and if the students made macabre jokes while dissecting, it was as a defense against the horror of what they were doing.

The rapidly falling rate of postmortems performed in hospitals is something that as a doctor I deplore, for the postmortem is the final diagnostic court of appeal and an unequaled way for physicians to learn from their mistakes (interestingly, the technological refinements of the past few decades have not increased the proportion of correct diagnoses proved at postmortem, suggesting that technological sophistication may have been accompanied by a decline in personal skill among physicians). But while I recognize the value of the postmortem to humanity, I don't particularly want one performed on me or anyone I care for, unless the victim of foul play: for there remains an aura of desecration about the whole business of the mortuary that no higher purpose can entirely dissipate.

Mankind owes a great deal to postmortems, much as they might revolt its natural feelings. Without them, there would have been no science of pathology, and without pathology, modern medicine would hardly even have started. But mankind owes nothing to the kind of mutilation seen in Fallujah, quite the contrary. This is always a symptom of limitless ...