Legacy medical collections and the bioconscripted dead

In this article I offer the “bioconscripted dead” as a sensitizing analytic for many of the dead whose bodies were used to produce legacy medical collections. Internationally, these collections and their status as teaching objects are the focus of growing public contention. In the institutional imaginaries of many universities and museums, more and more collections are being transformed from mundane scientific tools into highly charged materials, demanding institutional response. I trace how the concept that elucidates multiple violences in the production, circulation and ongoing use of legacy medical collections emerged from the interwoven empirical, theoretical, and speculative research of the Living Well with the Dead Research Collective in University College Cork. Impetus for the convening of this Collective came from official investigations of the use by universities of the dead from Ireland’s notorious “death worlds” (Mbembe 2003) known as Mother and Baby Institutions. I consider the affordances of the concept to efforts to take seriously the legacies of universities’ historical complicity in technoscientific violence and expand the parameters of conventional bioethics. The concept’s potential to generate new questions and help counter institutional forgetting (Hicks 2025), disappearing acts (Taylor 1997) and epistemologies of ignorance (Tuana 2004) are addressed.