Exhumed cadaver. Buried 10 months. 150 years before the start of the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, medical anthropologists in France were (legally) exhuming cadavers of vagrants and unidentified persons. They were examining the postmortem changes in the body when the circumstances of death were known, and the body was buried or stored in various conditions. By studying known cases, they were more able to examine and identify cadavers of unknown origin, and re-examine exhumed cadavers when a death is deemed suspicious after burial. The science of forensic anthropology languished and was largely ignored during most of the Victorian era, at least in the “Western” world. Even so, the work done by French physicians at the end of the 18th and into the 19th century provided a solid scientific foundation for when the field found much renewed interest, around the turn of the 20th century. Trait des Exhumations Juridiques. M. Orfila and M. O. Lesueur, 1834.

Exhumed cadaver. Buried 10 months.

150 years before the start of the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, medical anthropologists in France were (legally) exhuming cadavers of vagrants and unidentified persons. They were examining the postmortem changes in the body when the circumstances of death were known, and the body was buried or stored in various conditions. By studying known cases, they were more able to examine and identify cadavers of unknown origin, and re-examine exhumed cadavers when a death is deemed suspicious after burial.

The science of forensic anthropology languished and was largely ignored during most of the Victorian era, at least in the “Western” world. Even so, the work done by French physicians at the end of the 18th and into the 19th century provided a solid scientific foundation for when the field found much renewed interest, around the turn of the 20th century.

Trait des Exhumations Juridiques. M. Orfila and M. O. Lesueur, 1834.

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