Reading the 'foreign skull': an episode in nineteenth-century colonial human dissection

For a fuller account of this episode, see Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006), published in Australia as Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005).This is a post-print of an article published in Australian Historical Studies 2005 published by Melbourne University Publishing. This version is reproduced with permission from Melbourne University Publishing.The death of William Lanney in 1869 was thought to mark the virtual extinction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal race. European and colonial scientists longed to possess Lanney’s bones for museum collections, and several of Hobart’s medical men set about the business of harvesting them. In histories of racial relations in Tasmania, this episode has become an exemplar of the brutal process of settler colonialism in that place. However, the mutilation of Lanney’s body also involved the dismemberment of a European man. Placing him at the centre of the episode reveals how the colony’s medical men obtained ‘subjects for dissection’ when few were legally available, and tells us something rich about the history of medicine in Tasmania