London Month of the Dead - Bat Skeleton Mounting Workshop

DEATH IN THE KITCHEN The History of Home Post Mortems with Dr Jennifer Wallis Saturday the 11th October 2025 at 1:30 pm Before custom-built mortuary spaces were widely available, doctors and pathologists often had to make do with other locations, from schoolrooms and sheds to pubs and houses. Throughout the 19th and into the mid 20th century, many rural GPs were tasked with performing postmortems for the coroner in cases of sudden or suspicious death. Some of these doctors found themselves improvising with the contents of ordinary domestic households: dining tables, bowls, towels, and buckets. What did this mean for families, and for the professional status of both GPs and pathologists? In this talk, historian Dr Jennifer Wallis reveals the ‘domestic postmortem’ to be a practice that can tell us a great deal about the history of pathology, the emotional and sensory experiences of death, the tensions between rural and urban medicine, and the increasingly proscribed role of the GP in the 20th century. Tickets £12.50 including a 20% donation toward a host of restoration projects at Kensal Green Cemetery and a Victorian punch. Jennifer Wallis Dr Jennifer Wallis is a Lecturer and Senior Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London. Her publications include Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices (2017) and the co-authored volume Anxious Times: Medicine & Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019). She is also the Press Officer for indie publisher Headpress.	/td>

DEATH IN THE KITCHEN
The History of Home Post Mortems with Dr Jennifer Wallis
Saturday the 11th October 2025 at 1:30 pm

Before custom-built mortuary spaces were widely available, doctors and pathologists often had to make do with other locations, from schoolrooms and sheds to pubs and houses. Throughout the 19th and into the mid 20th century, many rural GPs were tasked with performing postmortems for the coroner in cases of sudden or suspicious death. Some of these doctors found themselves improvising with the contents of ordinary domestic households: dining tables, bowls, towels, and buckets. What did this mean for families, and for the professional status of both GPs and pathologists?

In this talk, historian Dr Jennifer Wallis reveals the ‘domestic postmortem’ to be a practice that can tell us a great deal about the history of pathology, the emotional and sensory experiences of death, the tensions between rural and urban medicine, and the increasingly proscribed role of the GP in the 20th century.

Tickets £12.50 including a 20% donation toward a host of restoration projects at Kensal Green Cemetery and a Victorian punch.

Jennifer Wallis
Dr Jennifer Wallis is a Lecturer and Senior Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London. Her publications include Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices (2017) and the co-authored volume Anxious Times: Medicine & Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019). She is also the Press Officer for indie publisher Headpress.

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