Accounting for Death

Abstract

Whilst the mortuary acts as a site where the causes of death and disease are discovered, the General Register Office (GRO) acts as a site where causes are tabulated and where patterns of mortality are revealed. It is in the GRO that the decisions made in the mortuary are summated and classified according to the various sections of the WHO nosology. In other words, the examination of the physical body is followed by an analysis of the social body and, in the language of Foucault (1979), a bio-politics of population supersedes a political anatomy of the human frame. In both cases, however, it is the individual corpse which acts as the point of articulation for social practices and medical theories. In both cases death is individualised, and in both cases the physical nature of death is given primary emphasis.