This Saturday, the Old Operating Theatre in St. Thomas' Hospital (Nearest Tube: London Bridge) will be hosting a lecture on blood, that most vital of liquors.
Saturday 30th August 2pm
The Day of Blood (Part 1)
(In Association with the Blood Transfusion Service)
"The Blood is the Life"
From bloodletting and leechcraft, via William Harvey's pioneering discovery of circulation
to the first successful transfusion at Guy's Hospital in 1829,
a lecture on the living history of blood.
A black woman who is to undergo a foot amputation was initially offered a white artificial replacement because they were cheaper.
The woman, from Calcot near Reading, is yet to have the operation and health chiefs have now backed down and offered her prosthetics matching her own skin colour after she complained.
A Trust spokeswoman said: "She was originally told she would have to pay more for any other colour, but that has now been resolved."
There is a legend which tells how a poor man in Rome had a leg which the doctors feared would cause his death. So he prayed to Saint Cosmo and Saint Damian and asked them to help him in his need. And that night when he was asleep, he saw the doctor saints standing at his bedside in their red robes and caps trimmed with fur. One held a knife and the other a pot of ointment.
"What shall we do to replace this leg when we have cut it off?" asked Saint Cosmo.
"A black man has just died and been buried near here," answered Saint Damian. "He no longer needs his legs, so let us take one of them and put it on instead."
So they cut off the bad leg and fetched the leg of the black man, and with the ointment joined it on to the living man.
And when he awoke he believed he must have dreamt about the visit of the saints, but when he looked at his leg, behold! it was black and perfectly sound and well. Then they sent and searched for the black body, and on it they found a white leg. So the man knew that the doctor saints had heard his prayers, and had come to cure him.
Felix, the eighth pope after Saint Gregory, did make a noble church at Rome of the saints Cosmo and Damian, and there was a man which served devoutly the holy martyrs in that church, who a canker had consumed all his thigh. And as he slept, the holy martyrs Cosmo and Damian, appeared to him their devout servant, bringing with them an instrument and ointment of whom that one said to that other: Where shall we have flesh when we have cut away the rotten flesh to fill the void place? Then that other said to him: There is an Ethiopian that this day is buried in the churchyard of Saint Peter ad Vincula, which is yet fresh, let us bear this thither, and take we out of that morian's flesh and fill this place withal.
And so they fetched the thigh of the sick man and so changed that one for that other. And when the sick man awoke and felt no pain, he put forth his hand and felt his leg without hurt, and then took a candle, and saw well that it was not his thigh, but that it was another. And when he was well come to himself, he sprang out of his bed for joy, and recounted to all the people how it was happed to him, and that which he had seen in his sleep, and how he was healed. And they sent hastily to the tomb of the dead man, and found the thigh of him cut off, and that other thigh in the tomb instead of his.
The Photographers' Gallery (8 Great Newport Street, London) is holding a retrospective of the work of Enrique Metinides until the 14th of September. Metinides captured the disasters and crimes of Mexico City on film from the late 1940s to the end of the 70s.
Although comparisons with the New York crime-scene photographer Weegee are inevitable, the context, content and style are quite different. In their way, Metinides's photos are like scenes from unmade movies, using a wide-angle lens and daylight flash, the latter in emulation of news photographers he'd seen in the movies. "My first photograph was always the facade of the building where the crime has been committed," he says in an interview in the exhibition's catalogue, "then one of the entrance, the cartridge case, the blood, the overturned drawer, the corpse. That's a film but in still photos."
These images aren't cheap magazine "photoplays". The deaths and disasters are real. Lingering on the blood, the faces of corpses, a murderer's blood-spattered grin, a stabbing victim's pained astonishment, Metinides made himself Mexico's best-known newspaper photographer. Images of such unrelieved and awful intimacy, intensity and apparent salaciousness are difficult for a British audience, but commonplace in Central and South America. They occupy a cultural place we find hard to understand.
Set in the centre of the exhibition is a series of three images of a man, 45-year-old Antonio 'N'. Balanced precariously on the framework of the city's Toreo Stadium, two rescue workers persuade him not to jump.
Having been returned safely to solid ground, the man is quoted as saying "I wanted to know what death was like." Perhaps he should have asked Metinides.
A Jackson, Michigan, stripper was recently accused of squirting breast milk in a client's face:
"We looked at the report and, based on the evidence, we don't believe we could obtain a guilty verdict beyond a reasonable doubt," Julius Giglio, city attorney, told the Jackson Citizen Patriot.
And in Bristol, a book bound in the skin of a murderer, John Horwood, has gone on display. The book itself contains the findings of the murder's own dissection, which took place in 1821. In those days, Christian belief in resurrection following the Apocalypse relied on the revived having a physical body for God's magic to re-animate. Thus, dissection became an added deterrant for would-be murderers, a punishment which went beyond death:
His flayed skin was taken to a local tanner, who turned it into leather for the equivalent of £1.50. The surgeon, Richard Smith, spent a further £10 having the book bound and the front cover embossed with the skull and crossbones at each corner. The words Cutis Vera Johannis Horwood (The Skin of John Horwood) were added in gilt letters.
Ted Williams' head is no longer attached to his body. And people took pictures. Sports Illustrated reports:
Williams' body was flown to Arizona almost immediately after his death on the morning of July 5, 2002, and was on an operating table at Alcor later that night. One witness told the magazine that Williams' head was removed in "neuroseparation" surgery, even though [his son] John Henry had earlier indicated that he wanted a full-body suspension, and that "many people" snapped pictures of the famous patient during the operation.
I saw a body in the driver's seat with its arms by its side. There was no head attached to the body at all. The body had a seatbelt on.
The rope used in the successful suicide was purchased from the lovelorn man's place of employment. The receipt for the employee-discounted sale was found in his pocket.
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I looked through the open door of a shop and saw a skeleton-like contraption, made of linen, wire, and strips of cane. It was the article of clothing that we call a crinoline. When women wear it they become equal in size, young girls as well as old women. I could not help thinking that in a thousand years women will not wear crinolines, perhaps will not even know the name.
It appears that there was once a young and beautiful Empress, who in her womanly modesty invented the crinoline to hide her burgeoning motherhood from the world, and because she was so young and beautiful, the other women all wanted to look like her, so they too adopted the crinoline. The thick and the thin, the tall and the short. It was not a style becoming everybody, which must have amused the lovely and clever Empress, she who had set the fashion in motion.
We have two different substances preserved for medicinal use under the name of mummy, though both are in some degree of the same origin. The first one is the dried and preserved flesh of human bodies, embalmed with myrrh and spices; the other is the liquor running from such mummies, when newly prepared, or when affected by great heat or damps. The latter is sometimes in a liquid, sometimes of a solid form, as it is preserved in vials well stopped, or suffered to dry and harden in the air. The first kind of mummy is brought to us in large pieces, of a lax and friable texture, light and spungy, of a blackish brown colour, and often damp and clammy on the surface: it is of a strong but disagreeable smell. The second kind of mummy, in its liquid state, is a thick, opaque, and viscous fluid, of a blackish colour, but not disagreeable smell. In its indurated state, it is a dry solid substance of a fine shining black colour, and close texture, easily broken. and of good smell; very inflammable, and yielding a scent of myrrh and aromatic ingredients while burning.
This, if we cannot be content without medicines from our own bodies, ought to be the mummy used in the shops; but it is very scarce and dear; while the other is so cheap, that it will always be most in use.
All these kinds of mummy are brought from Egypt. But we are not to imagine that anybody breaks up the real Egyptian mummies, to sell tham in pieces to the druggists, as they may make a much better market of them in Europe whole, when they can contrive to get them. What our druggists are supplied with, is the flesh of executed criminals, or of any other bodies the Jews can get, who fill them with the common bitumen so plentiful in that part of the world; and adding a little aloes, and two or three other cheap ingredients, send them to be baked in an oven, till the juices are exhaled, and the embalming matter has penetrated so thoroughly that the flesh will keep and bear transporting into Europe. Mummy has been esteemed resolvent and balsamic: but whatever virtues have been attributed to it, seem to be such as depend more upon the ingredients used in preparing the flesh, than in the flesh itself; and it would surely be better to give those ingredients without so shocking an addition.
Excerpt from the Encylopædia Britannica, 1771 edition
via Everything2.org
Ötzi the Iceman went down fighting, according to the BBC. The 5,300 year old bronze age corpse was found by hikers 12 years ago, and many theories have been offered for the cause of his demise. But with an arrowhead found in his back and several people's blood on his weapons, it looks like the evidence tilts in favor of battle.
There's a long history of mummies being sold on the black market. In the Nineteenth century, during the great English craze for all things Egyptian, they were thought to be an aphrodisiac, and so were ground up into a powder and consumed. Needless to say, this resulted in a secondary black market for the passing-off of fake mummies as real ones.
The desire among some to possess a desiccated ancient has been with us for some time and is likely to remain. Which is bad news for the Ibaloi mummies of the Philippines. Plundered for sale to collectors, picked apart for good luck charms- proof that even death doesn't make existence any easier.
A description of the carving which is the oldest known (ca. 2400 B.C.) record of the unkindest cut:
In the first scene, an assistant stands behind one of the youths, gripping his arms and pulling them back while the priest operates with a stone knife. "Hold him and do not allow him to faint," reads the inscription.
In the second scene, the boy being circumcised urges the priest-surgeon to "thoroughly rub off what is there."
The circumcising priest replies, "I will cause it to heal."
This was a right hand of a murderer that was severed while the corpse was still hanging from the gallows. It was then used as a charm or in black magic practices after being magically preserved. It is also believed robbers often used the hand when breaking into buildings and homes.
Preferably the hand was cut off during the eclipse of the moon. Afterwards it was wrapped in a shroud, squeezed of blood and pickled for two weeks in an earthenware jar with salt, long peppers and saltpeter. Then it was either dried in an oven with vervain, an herb believed to be able to ward off demons, or laid out to dry in the sun, desirably in the hot dog days of August.
When the hand was ready, candles were fitted on it between the fingers. These were called the "dead man's candles" and were made from another murderer's fat, with the wick being made from his hair.
Another method of curing the severed and dried hand was dip it in wax. After this process the fingers themselves could be lit.
During the Gulf War of 1991, American military engineers notoriously bulldozed occupied trenches, burying Iraqi conscripts in their hundreds, perhaps even in their thousands. 'I came through right after the Lead Company,' recalled Colonel Anthony Moreno, Commander of the First Mechanized Infantry Division's Second Brigade. 'What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and things sticking out of them.'
The Guardian has more on these under-reported premature burials.
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Ahh, Pope Benedict IX- What didn't he get up to? Legend has it, he made Pope at only 12 years of age, but sources differ- He may have been as old as his early twenties. What's known for sure is that he was Pope three times between 1032 and 1048- The first time and third time, he was driven out by outraged factions within the church. The middle stint ended when he sold the Papacy for a tidy sum, though apologists are still trying to spin that positively.
He was well-known for his bisexual orgies, habitual sodomy, occasional bestiality, marrying a cousin or two- but his open Satanism probably clinched his infamy. Dante figured the Papacy had reached its nadir in Benedict IX- despite stiff competition.
There was rebellion- An antipope was appointed to unseat him. His opponents attempted to assassinate him via strangling- while he was at the altar during mass. Despite his enemies, despite his Papal comings and goings, he managed to hang on- and after he stood down, he turned the Lateran Palace into Rome's finest brothel.
No one is expected to take these musings on the strength of the above links. They are, after all, mere pixel-dust. Benedict's theatrical history features in numerous "real" sources, among them:
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church by Malachi Martin, The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists by Karl Shaw, and Holy Horrors by James A. Haught.
