title: [Autopsies of the real: resurrecting the dead].
abstract: The sense of the real, or the material - the dead body - as an inextricable part of the sacred does not disappear in the secular environment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article analyzes specific humanitarian narratives centered on the practice of autopsy and mummification, in which the traces of Catholicism act as a kind of spectral discourse of the imagination, where the real is configured in forms of the uncanny, the monstrous or the sacred.
authors.affiliation: Yale University.
authors.forename: Noël
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Valis
mesh_terms: D001344:Autopsy / Q000266:history; D002410:Catholicism / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D007092:Imagination; D009106:Mummies / Q000266:history; D035621:Secularism / Q000266:history