ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how record-keeping became an integral part of the modernisation of the coroner’s court at the turn of the twentieth century. It first argues that the conduct of the coroner’s office was institutionalised as a court of record, a sitting of the coroner’s court, through the technology of the file. But it also considers the effects of this technology on both the role of the coroner, who increasingly assumed responsibility for recording a biography of the dead, and on the dead, who appeared as neither things nor persons, but records in an archive of institutional memory. The chapter concludes that the duty of record-keeping was essential to how coroners took care of the dead. Coroners collected biographical information about the deceased, narrating their lives and deaths, through the technology of the file, which has come to signify one of the most important functions of the coronial jurisdiction.
