Monday, April 19, 2004

   More from the Little Book of Bad Taste!
All right, continuing with my posts dedicated to bad taste, thanks to The Little Book of Bad Taste, I'm going to keep this moving-however I'm going to do this a little differently this time. The last few times I picked a few things from a few different sections of the book, but this time I'm going to stick to one section of the book. I'm sure it will still be just as enjoyable-well, to the right person anyway. Here it goes!

10 Uses for a Dead Person
1) When D.H. Lawrence died, his lover Frieda had his ashes tipped into a concrete mixer and incorporated into her new mantelpiece.

2) In 1891 French surgeon Dr Varlot developed a method of preserving corpses by covering them with a thin layer of metal (in effect, he was electroplating the dead). Dr Varlot's technique involved making the body conductive by exposing it to silver nitrate, then immersing it in a galvanic bath of copper sulfate, producing a millimeter-thick coating of copper: "a brilliant red copper finish of exceptional strength and durability."

3) In ancient Rome, where human blood was prescribed as a cure for epilepsy, epileptics hung around near exit gates of public arenas so that they could drink the blood of slain gladiators as they were dragged out.

4) In medieval Europe it was fashionable to eat and rub into the body bits of ancient Egyptian mummy for medical purposes. The body parts of decomposing Egyptians were widely touted as a cure for abscesses, fractures, contusions, paralysis, migraine, epilepsy, sore throats, nausea, disorders of the liver and spleen and internal ulcers. In the early part of this century some Arab tribes were still using mummies to prevent hemorrhaging. Mummy-trafficing became a lucrative and highly organized business, starting in the Egyptian tombs and following a well-planned route to Europe. The bottom finally fell out of the mummy market in the late seventeenth century, when people found out that dealers were selling "fake" mummy made out of recently murdered slaves.

5) Elizabethan medical text books recommended an alternative cure-all: powdered human skull dissolved in red wine.

6) British farmers were "processing" human corpses to create raw materials long before the Nazis thought of it. On November 18, 1882 the Observer reported that the Napoleonic battlefields of Leipzig, Austerlitz and Waterloo had been "swept alike of the bones of the hero and of the horse which he rode," and that hundreds of tons of bones had been shipped to Yorkshire bone-grinders to make fertilizers for farmers. After the siege of Plevna in 1877 a local newspaper farming column casually reported that "30 tons of human bones, comprising 30,000 skeletons, have just been landed at Bristol from Plevna."

7) German scientists involved in a car safety research at the University of Heidelberg routinely use human crash dummies, including the corpses of children. Researchers in other countries have condemned the practice of smashing human cadavers into brick walls as abhorrent, but it hasn't prevented many from paying to see the results.

8) When the mistress of the nineteenth-century French novelist Eugene Sue died, she willed him her skin with instructions that he should bind a book with is. He did.

9) The philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham lamented the wasteful business of burying dead people, and suggested that every man, if properly embalmed, could be used as his own commemorative bust or statue: he called them "autoicons." The possibilities, Bentham posited, were endless: portraits of ancestors could be replaced with actual heads, "...many generations being deposited on a few shelves or in a modest sized cupboard." When Bentham died he put his money where his mouth was by leaving instructions that his own body be dissected for the benefit of medical science, then embalmed, dressed in his own clothes, and placed in a glass case. His head had to be replaced with a wax version, however, because he had taken on an unfortunately grim expression during the embalming process. Bentham's physician, Dr Southwood Smith, kept the body until his own death in 1850, when it was presented to University Collage, London.

10) The size of regulation soccer ball, roughly the size of a man's head, was arrived at by design: the first football ever used in England was the head of a dead Danish brigand.

There you have it, another chapter in bad taste come and gone. What I posted wasn't very entertaining in the sense of humor, as some of them were the last couple times I did this, however I think they are at least interesting-in a morbid kind of way. Leave your comments if you wish, thanks.
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