Ian Burney | The University of Manchester (original) (raw)

Papers by Ian Burney

The American Historical Review, 2001

... BODIES OF EVIDENCE Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest 1830-1926 IAN A.BURNEY Th... more ... BODIES OF EVIDENCE Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest 1830-1926 IAN A.BURNEY The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London ... For all she has sacrificed, today she shares with me a decade of a life lived, Cailin and Rohin, a book, and my heart. ...

Comparative Legal History

This article examines the processes through which civilian fear was turned into a practicable inv... more This article examines the processes through which civilian fear was turned into a practicable investigative object in the inter-war period and the opening stages of the Second World War, and how it was invested with significance at the level of science and of public policy. Its focus is on a single historical actor, Solly Zuckerman, and on his early war work for the Ministry of Home Security-funded Extra Mural Unit based in Oxford’s Department of Anatomy (OEMU). It examines the process by which Zuckerman forged a working relationship with fear in the 1930s, and how he translated this work to ques-tions of home front anxiety in his role as an operational research officer. In doing so it demonstrates the persistent work applied to the problem: by highlighting it as an ongoing research project, and suggesting links between seemingly disparate research objects (e.g. the phenomenon of ‘blast ’ exposure as physical and physiological trauma), the article aims to show how civilian ‘nerve ’ ...

Journal of British Studies, 1999

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

This article is part of an on-going research project on the history of homicide investigation in ... more This article is part of an on-going research project on the history of homicide investigation in twentieth-century England. The project involves two main strands: first, developments in techniques and working practices of forensic pathological investigation; and second, developments in crime scene investigation driven by forensic science. Its working hypothesis is that, over the course of the century, the latter model of trace-oriented and team-driven investigation made inroads into the status of the pathologist. However, this is not a linear story, in which a forensics of bodies was ultimately eclipsed by a forensics of things. Instead, the relationship is better characterised as a dynamic interplay between two sets of practices, personnel, and spaces.At the center of the Christie case stood a house: 10 Rillington Place, a dingy Victorian tenement in a non-descript Notting Hill cul-de-sac. The probing of this space by investigators transformed it into a macabre excavation site, in which a forensics of bodies and things were thrown together in a collaborative exercise. Focusing in detail on the recovery and analysis of bodies and traces enables us to see how these two forensic enterprises interacted to generate knowledge from their encounters with the material world of number 10

44 Ed Elsevier 2013, Mar 1, 2013

Representations, 2013

This article explores the articulation of the crime scene as a distinct space of theory and pract... more This article explores the articulation of the crime scene as a distinct space of theory and practice in the early twentieth century. In particular it focuses on the evidentiary hopes invested in what would at first seem an unpromising forensic object: dust. Ubiquitous and, to the uninitiated, characterless, dust nevertheless featured as an exemplary object of cutting-edge forensic analysis in two contemporary domains: writings of criminologists and works of detective fiction. The article considers how in these texts dust came to mark the furthest reach of a new forensic capacity they were promoting, one that drew freely upon the imagination to invest crime scene traces with meaning.

Medical History, 2011

This article explores the status, apparatus and character of forensic pathology in the inter-war ... more This article explores the status, apparatus and character of forensic pathology in the inter-war period, with a special emphasis on the ‘people’s pathologist’, Bernard Spilsbury. The broad expert and public profile of forensic pathology, of which Spilsbury was the most prominent contemporary representative, will be outlined and discussed. In so doing, close attention will be paid to the courtroom strategies by which he and other experts translated their isolated post-mortem encounters with the dead body into effective testimony.Pathologists built a high-profile practice that transfixed the popular, legal and scientific imagination, and this article also explores, through the celebrated 1925 murder trial of Norman Thorne, how Spilsbury’s courtroom performance focused critical attention on the practices of pathology itself, which threatened to destabilise the status of forensic pathology. In particular, the Thorne case raised questions about the interrelation between bruising and putr...

The American Historical Review, 2006

him to the outer realms of economics, gender politics and parapsychology. Embracing the spirit of... more him to the outer realms of economics, gender politics and parapsychology. Embracing the spirit of science as he saw it, Sidgwick became a founder of the Metaphysical Society, the Synthetic Society and the Society for Psychical Research, all in the belief that empirical study would eventually answer the ' central questions ' of life (and afterlife). Of course, such questions begged others-whether, for example, right conduct and a progressive society were necessary consequences of social evolution. Sidgwick's early mid-Victorian individualism eventually found itself at odds with the guiding spirits of late Victorian collectivism. Yet perhaps to journey was more important than to arrive, and in tracing that journey Schultz takes us a long way. Much space is given to Sidgwick's membership in the 'Apostles ', and to his friendship (platonic or otherwise) with John Addington Symonds. Regrettably, we are told little about his work for the Moral Sciences Tripos. And while much is said of spiritualism, Sidgwick's links with scientists are more hinted at than explored. Still, we are left with a major monument to an eminent Victorian. Sidgwick's ' cloudy presence ' casts few rays on present discontents. But if we look deeply enough, we may see in his influence glimmers of things to come. As other reviewers have noted, Schultz is unsympathetic to Sidgwick's favourable views of empire, and deplores his views of race, which were not extreme for their day. Ironically, they formed the backdrop to a prophetic moment in 1908-when, eight years after Sidgwick's death, A. J. Balfour, his admiring student and brother-in-law, devoted that year's Sidgwick Memorial Lecture to the theme of 'Decadence '. Not long out of government, and soon to return, Balfour warned his audience against the 'deep discouragement ' he feared would overtake the West when, owing to poor leadership, 'learning languishes, enterprise slackens and vigour ebbs away ' (p. 657). Fears of an emerging Asia persuaded Teddy Roosevelt to propose an ' Anglo-Saxon Confederation ', in which the United States and Britain would confront the future together. It remains for our generation to ask how it was that later incumbents of the White House and Whitehall-notably lacking Sidgwick's moral prudence-would seize upon the same idea, and pursue it to the point of folly.

Poison, detection, and the Victorian imagination, 2021