It was the Age of Reason and Enlightenment that provided the real stimulus for the birth of the Western vampire, as this period saw a spate of vampire epidemics occur within Eastern Europe

The later Victorian asylum was increasingly dominated by anatomical pathological mental science based on thousands of post-mortems conducted on the dead among captive patient populations.

Dr Joseph Kahn’s Anatomical and Pathological Museum was the nineteenth-century’s best-known and most visited public museum of anatomy.

In his portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786, the Irish Carver, the Giant’s skeletal feet are clearly visible in the background.

What has happened to the thoughtful, bowler-hatted figure of the forensic pathologist, the spectacular but fallible artist of battered flesh?

The widespread observation that contemporaries were often confused by the organic instability of death and dying, leads us to a second generic theme in this book.