San Antonio College Library

The former chief medical examiner for Rockland County, N.Y., who wrote the definitive textbook on forensic pathology, provides a firsthand look inside eleven of his most notorious cases, following the scientific investigative process and the work of the pathologist from the crime scene to the world of high-tech criminal detection. Dr. Zugibe takes us through the whole process: we visit the often grisly crime scene; we inspect the body, palpate the...

In our culture, we rarely speak about death -- partly because it is seen as a sort of pornography, shrouded in indecency and immersed in taboos; and partly because we know so little about it. Yet nearly everyone at some point has questions about what happens after death. At long last, here is a book to answer many of those questions: What physical changes occur to a dead body?

A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited...