‘Opening Up the Body: The Post Mortem Case Books of St George's Hospital’ is a project to conserve, digitise, catalogue and make available the post mortem casebooks of St George's Hospital, 1841-1946. Alongside digital images of each case the catalogue records include information about the patients (name, age, gender, occupation, the disease(s) of which they died) and a brief summary of the case notes
There are different ways to explore this unique resource and to find your way around the collection. You can
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Browse or search the whole collection and find out more about the post mortem casebooks
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Browse the cases by disease type or anatomy identifying the cause of death or other diseases, such as respiratory tract diseases or diseases affecting the nervous system. The names of the diseases have been transcribed as well as standardised using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), and can also be explored with free text search
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Browse or search for St George's doctors. The catalogue includes authority records for each of the doctors recorded in the volumes. These can be used to for instance browse all the cases of Henry Gray or one of the first female doctors at St George’s, Helen Ingleby
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Browse all the illustrations and photographs in the collection
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Browse all the cases where the death was caused by trauma or accident, homicide or murder or suicide
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Find more inspiration and learn more about the post mortems on our project page, where you can discover the range of subjects covered by the volumes by reading highlights from the case histories, view the post mortems through our visualisations and read how you can use the collection as a genealogical resource and for studying social history through occupations recorded in the case notes.
For regular updates on new uploads and highlights from the project, you can follow the archive on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. You can also find out more on our website and on our blog.
If you have any questions about the project please contact our Archives team at archives@sgul.ac.uk.