Stiffs Skulls Skeletons

This intriguing and comprehensive exploration of the skeleton and the dead body includes more than 400 rare photographs. Stanley B. Burns, MD, has studied, collected and written on medical photography for over four decades focusing on unexplored areas. His books have placed him in the forefront of medical photographic history scholarship. This work reveals the nineteenth-century fascination with the dead body and body parts. The classic visual iconography of postmortem, dissection, and bone photography is presented and expanded to include early autopsy images and X-ray studies. No prior visual work has presented the once very popular hobby of collecting skulls and also shown their use in racial and psychological profiling research. This sumptuously illustrated book with previously unpublished photographs is an extraordinary work of medical, historical and cultural research. It is a timeless visual essay that will surely become a standard resource for collectors, curators, artists, and scholars.

Contemporary audiences are often shocked to learn that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, medical students around the world posed for photographic portraits with their cadavers; a genre known as dissection photography. Featuring previously unseen images, stories, and anecdotes, this book explores the visual culture of death within the gross anatomy lab through the tradition of dissection photography, examining its historical aspects from both photographic and medical perspectives. The author pays particular attention to the use of dissection photographs as an expression of student identity, and as an evolving transgressive ritual intricately connected to, and eventually superseding, the act of dissection itself.

This volume addresses the interdependencies between visual technologies and epistemology with regard to our perception of the medical body. The contributions investigate medical bodies as historical, technological and political constructs, constituted where knowledge formation and visual cultures intersect.

Beloved, best-selling science writer Mary Roach’s “acutely entertaining, morbidly fascinating” (Susan Adams, Forbes) classic, now with a new epilogue. For two thousand years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. “Delightful—though never disrespectful” (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should we do after we die? “This quirky, funny read offers perspective and insight about life, death and the medical profession. . . . You can close this book with an appreciation of the miracle that the human body really is.” —Tara Parker-Pope, Wall Street Journal “Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting.” —Entertainment Weekly

On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world’s most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship. A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives—captivating and macabre in all the right ways—she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.

Each October, as the Day of the Dead draws near, Mexican marketsoverflow with decorated breads, fanciful paper cutouts, andwhimsical toy skulls and skeletons. To honor deceased relatives,Mexicans decorate graves and erect home altars. Drawing on a richarray of historical and ethnographic evidence, this volume revealsthe origin and changing character of this celebrated holiday. Itexplores the emergence of the Day of the Dead as a symbol ofMexican and Mexican-American national identity. Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead poses a serious challengeto the widespread stereotype of the morbid Mexican, unafraid ofdeath, and obsessed with dying. In fact, the Day of the Dead, asshown here, is a powerful affirmation of life and creativity.Beautifully illustrated, this book is essential for anyoneinterested in Mexican culture, art, and folklore, as well ascontemporary globalization and identity formation.

With a hearty helping of Detroit grit, the stories in Stiff pay homage to a city turned upside down by economic abandonment. Steve Hughes pushes the boundaries of realism, creating situations that seem odd and otherworldly. In his Detroit, witches cast spells to improve their husbands, chickens grow from seeds, and house painters with anger management issues declare themselves poet laureates. The characters in Stiff are all searching for something in each other—a certain wholeness or understanding, a place to rest and call home. Hughes writes with great empathy about people who are struggling with their lives. In "Ripening," a man and woman in an illicit affair witness their genitals leaving their bodies for a rendezvous. In "Dexter’s Song," a drug-addicted saxophone player meets a bored suburban woman who gives him her ex-boyfriend’s sax, which unleashes a series of disasters but the instrument is so fine, so perfect, that when he holds it to his lips he can do no wrong. Readers of contemporary fiction will enjoy this inventive and evocative collection of stories.

Pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight, are undergoing a long-running scientific renaissance that has seen sustained, and even elevated interest, from several generations of palaeontologists. These incredible reptiles are known from every continent, flew the Mesozoic skies for at least 160 million years, diversified into more than a dozen major clades and well over 100 species, and included the largest flying animals of all time. This volume brings together leading pterosaur researchers from around the globe to discuss new and cutting-edge research into various aspects of pterosaur palaeobiology and presents diverse papers to deliver new insights on flying reptile palaeoecology, flight, ontogeny, skeletal and soft-tissue anatomy, temporal and spatial distribution and evolution, as well as revisions of their taxonomy and interrelationships.