Practices
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Anatomy of Dread: The Victorian Obsession for Blood, Disease, and the Gothic Revival
Victorian England’s fascination with blood symbolized both life and corruption, merging medical science with Gothic horror. Bloodletting, early transfusions, and…
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Death, Burial Spaces and the Dead-House in Victorian Asylums
The later Victorian asylum was increasingly dominated by anatomical pathological mental science based on thousands of post-mortems conducted on the…
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The Rise of Obscene Public Anatomy in Victorian London
Dr Joseph Kahn’s Anatomical and Pathological Museum was the nineteenth-century’s best-known and most visited public museum of anatomy.
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Hunter’s Resurrection, Corpse Art, and the Stolen Irish Giant
In his portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786, the Irish Carver, the Giant’s skeletal…
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The Hideous Rise and Fall of Celebrity, Murderous Pathology
What has happened to the thoughtful, bowler-hatted figure of the forensic pathologist, the spectacular but fallible artist of battered flesh?
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Dissecting The Condemned Body Leaving the Courtroom
The widespread observation that contemporaries were often confused by the organic instability of death and dying, leads us to a…
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The Murder Act Dissections: A Fate Worse than Death
Anatomy, the branch of science concerned with the bodily structure of humans, especially as revealed by dissection and the separation…
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Prescientific Death Rites, Vampires, and the Human Soul
For most of us in twentieth-first-century Europe and North America, few things are so absolute as death.
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Art of the Dead: Mangling the Dissected, Past and Present
Art of the dead or the idea that the anatomisation of the body is tantamount to “hacking”, “distorting”, or “disfiguring”?…
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Anatomist’s Knife and Dissection in Victorian England
In Victorian times, dissection was then regarded with horror. Even at present, the prejudices of the people on this subject…
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Body-Snatchers and the Legal, Grave Medical Problem
The activities of the eighteenth-century body-snatchers are among the most lurid and entertaining episodes in the history of medicine.
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The Bygone Times Of The Frightening Plague Doctors
To provide medical care and to protect themselves, doctors of the time invented the medieval version of a hazmat suit,…
