“Case”, “dead” and the like: meanings of the corpse in the midst of its medicalization

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to understand how the medicalization of death, that is, the transformation of death into an institutionalized event according to the model of medicine of death and disease, interferes in social organization of death in Brazil today. In this article, we elicit two examples of technical knowledge and practices related to this medicalization. The first was the discourse organized by the Brazilian State and its agents on the fulfillment of the Death Certificate and how it implicitly separates illness, injury and death from its social background. The second was the speeches of the workers at the Coroner's Office and in the embalming laboratories and how they approximate (or depart) from the official language. Our goal is to show how death as a research object is not a separate “thing”, independent of the social elements that give it visibility.