Quand les morts passent un scanner
Abstract
During medico-legal examination, in cases of homicide or suspicious death, corpses undergo a series of technical and scientific tests in order to make them “talk” and identify the causes of death. In addition to conventional autopsy, medical imagery is now used as an investigative device. Based on ethnographic research in a Swiss forensic radiography expert center, we analyse the body’s ontological variations depending on its manipulation and the visualisation techniques used by forensic experts. The various "body tests", and in particular the techniques of virtual autopsy, shift the boundaries between living and dead, animate and inert, person and corpse. The redefinition of these borders meets scientific, technical, but also normative and moral requirements.
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