Unknown: Coroners’ Inquests and Unidentified Infant Bodies in Ontario, 1840–1900

Inquest files from the Canadian province of Ontario between 1840 and 1900 reveal the shifting evaluation of infant life and its repercussions. Hundreds of inquest records labelled “Unknown” are archived in Ontario and each documents discovery and investigation of the body of an infant. They were found everywhere in the province: in lakes, rivers, and streams, on streets, lanes, and empty lots, and in doorsteps, privies, and gardens. By the early 1870s, authorities considered these unknown to be an intensifying problem, and required coroners’ inquest and case file as part of the solution. Each body needed to be accounted for; to be studied and investigated, and to have a determination, no matter how inconclusive, on whether the infant had lived and if so, on the precise cause of death. Through these small files of unknown bodies, coroners developed knowledge purportedly of the conditions of infant life and how to measure them.

Working from Thomas Laqueur’s (2015) argument that dead bodies make living worlds, this paper examines the place of the infant corpse in this calculation and reveals how it was politically animated later than adult bodies. Discarding infant bodies unburied was tolerable until the 1860s but by the 1870s greater and more thorough investigations reveal the identification of a ‘modern problem’. Although few inquests led to decisive conclusions and criminal charges, the impact was cumulative. Inquests slowly built knowledge of the conditions of infant life, which by the twentieth century were rooted firmly in a biomedical register. Developing biomedical knowledge slowly displaced girls’ and women’s testimony of their pregnancies and births. Ultimately, the compulsion to identify infant life from the dead ignored the conditions of girls’ and women’s lives who birthed them, brokering the changed understanding of infant life against girls’ and women’s bodies.