ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the moral, religious and medical motives behind the demand by wealthy families in eighteenth-century Geneva that relatives be dissected. Moving between family archives and egodocuments, it argues that post-mortems offered families the chance to give meaning to suffering by understanding what had caused illness and death. While providing consolation, the findings also allowed them to address a growing concern: whether a hereditary condition might put other members’ lives at risk. However, families’ initiative should also be understood as part of patients’ active role in the medical encounter: the results of dissections provided them with the basis upon which to judge their physicians’ course of action in a crowded medical marketplace. Physicians also benefited from lay interest, as dissections produced new knowledge that they could deploy in their profession. Sharing such knowledge in academic circles, well into the early nineteenth century doctors focused on issues that could directly boost their diagnostic and therapeutic skills. </abstract>
