Manoobai Chand in Death: Dissection, Labor, and Science in Colonial India

Drawing from a 1913 General Department investigation from Bombay, this article maps the relationship between Annette Benson, the superintendent of Cama Hospital, and Manoobai Chand, a destitute woman whose body Benson had dissected. A study of their intertwined lives raises critical questions about the value assigned to marginalized bodies in life and in their death and the scientific labor that they produce. This article shows how anatomical examination was only possible when state regulations and scientific authority perceived certain bodies as valuable. Such a value was, in turn, only possible if those bodies were marked unproductive in life. Anatomical practice then depended on whose body could perform scientific labor and whose body could become of value. Methodologically, this article opens conversations on labor history and the history of science by interrogating the nature of labor and perceived value in producing scientific knowledge and extending the question of labor to the afterlife.