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Record W4416589487 · doi:10.1080/13576275.2025.2586001

The legal somatics of body bequests before the <i>Anatomy Act 1832</i>

2025· article· en· W4416589487 on OpenAlexaff
Joshua Shaw

Bibliographic record

VenueMortality · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistorical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Saskatchewan
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLegislationReasonable accommodationPower (physics)State (computer science)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Without the authority of legislation in the United Kingdom, some bequeathed their bodies to physicians, surgeons and apothecaries to dissect and create anatomical specimens in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Those individuals included the legal and political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who was publicly dissected and whose skeleton and preserved head were used to prepare the ‘Auto-Icon’. Other dissections were publicised in newsprints and periodicals, often alongside commentary on the prejudice against dissection and anatomy and calls for anatomy legislation. Such bequests attempted to interface with English law generally and anatomy law specifically, but how they did so and with what effect are less obvious. Accordingly, the author undertakes the study of body bequests before legislation, so to identify and analyse their significance to the law’s conception of what could be done with or to a human corpse. He argues that body bequests relied on a kind of legal somatics or somatechnics in the use of the body, through which alternate imaginaries of the corpse, and attendant normative understandings, were visualised and instituted. By doing so, testators, executors and dissectors sought to affirm the law as they thought it should be, by acting as if it already were the law.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.986
Threshold uncertainty score0.054

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0140.071
Scholarly communication0.0060.003
Open science0.0010.006
Research integrity0.0040.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.309
Teacher spread0.269 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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