Medieval History
When you bury family members in a cemetery, you expect them to stay there. Not so 200 years ago, however, when body snatchers prowled the nation?s burial grounds looking for subjects. This lucrative cottage industry was driven by an acute shortage of bodies that were available for dissection by the growing number of medical students.
Now, a new book has amassed, for the first time, archaeological evidence for what happened to the corpses, from dissection and autopsy through to reburial and display. Many of the new findings have never been published before.
The book reveals how the macabre activities of the body snatchers helped to further the progress of medicine and science by improving understanding of how the human body worked.
Click here to read this article from Early Modern England
- Ancient Burial Cloth Reveals Bronze Age Trade Connections
A piece of nettle cloth retrieved from Denmark?s richest known Bronze Age burial mound Lusehøj may actually derive from Austria, new findings suggest. The cloth thus tells a surprising story about long-distance Bronze Age trade connections around 800...
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Republican congressman Todd Akin?s astonishing observations with respect to pregnancy resulting from rape continue to ricochet around the media in the United States. The nuances of his comments have gotten lost in the ensuing controversy over what constitutes...
- Debunking A Myth: In Medieval Christianity, Dissection Was Often Practiced
Studying dead women?s cut-up bodies was not what Katharine Park originally set out to do. ?I was writing a social history of medicine in Florence, a topic I chose basically just because I got to go? to that fabled Italian city, she joked. But while working...
- Zrinka Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology
Zrinka Stahuljak just published Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); 368 pp.http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15046.html The publisher's description: In...
- Call For Papers
34th Annual Meeting: Southeastern Medieval Association Bodies, Embodiments, Becomings 2-4 October 2008 Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri Call for Papers: due May 30 In his book Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that...
Medieval History
When stealing corpses was popular
Now, a new book has amassed, for the first time, archaeological evidence for what happened to the corpses, from dissection and autopsy through to reburial and display. Many of the new findings have never been published before.
The book reveals how the macabre activities of the body snatchers helped to further the progress of medicine and science by improving understanding of how the human body worked.
Click here to read this article from Early Modern England
- Ancient Burial Cloth Reveals Bronze Age Trade Connections
A piece of nettle cloth retrieved from Denmark?s richest known Bronze Age burial mound Lusehøj may actually derive from Austria, new findings suggest. The cloth thus tells a surprising story about long-distance Bronze Age trade connections around 800...
- Todd Akin?s Views Are, Literally, Medieval
Republican congressman Todd Akin?s astonishing observations with respect to pregnancy resulting from rape continue to ricochet around the media in the United States. The nuances of his comments have gotten lost in the ensuing controversy over what constitutes...
- Debunking A Myth: In Medieval Christianity, Dissection Was Often Practiced
Studying dead women?s cut-up bodies was not what Katharine Park originally set out to do. ?I was writing a social history of medicine in Florence, a topic I chose basically just because I got to go? to that fabled Italian city, she joked. But while working...
- Zrinka Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology
Zrinka Stahuljak just published Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); 368 pp.http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15046.html The publisher's description: In...
- Call For Papers
34th Annual Meeting: Southeastern Medieval Association Bodies, Embodiments, Becomings 2-4 October 2008 Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri Call for Papers: due May 30 In his book Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that...