‘Yes:—no:—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead’: undeath, the body and medicine

In this paper I propose that, since the mid-eighteenth century medical science has simultaneously generated and disavowed ‘undead’ bodies, suspended between life and death. Through close analysis of three examples of ‘undeath’ taken from different moments in medical history, I consider what these bodies can tell us about medicine, its history, cultural meaning, scientific status and its role in shaping ideas of embodiment, identity and death. My first example is Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The facts in the case of M. Valdemar’ which imagines the possibility of a man mesmerised at the point of death. I read this story as a response to the rise of professional, scientific medicine in the 1840s. I then look at the recurring issue of brain death in order to consider tensions within twentieth-century medical hegemony. Finally I read the Alder Hey scandal as a reactivation of undead anxiety in response to the emergent culture of medical consumerism at the end of the twentieth century.