Before custom-built mortuary spaces were widely available, doctors and pathologists often had to make do with other locations like from schoolrooms and houses and forcing them to improvise with the contents of ordinary domestic households: dining tables, bowls, towels, and buckets. What did this mean for families, and for the professional status of both GPs and pathologists? In this talk, historian Dr Jennifer Wallis reveals the ‘domestic postmortem’ to be a practice that can tell us a great deal about the history of pathology, and the emotional and sensory experiences of death.