Field trips

I get around in my van, affectionately dubbed the "Mother Ship," which is equipped with hand controls, but I don't go far because I have no sense of direction and a fear of getting lost. I have enlisted friends and family to accompany me on my field trips, either in the Mother Ship or by air (in which case I use the manual wheelchair rather than my scooter "BeBe"). Here is a list of some of those companions and adventures:

Jody Arlington went with me to the Library of Congress to see an anthropodermic book (more about those later); to a local taxidermist to learn how his craft would apply to the human body; and has taken me to many cemeteries, galleries, and museums in the Washington, D.C. area.

Cris Hastings has gone to West Virginia, Maryland, and Tennessee with me to see mummies; North Carolina to meet a carnival showman; to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia many times; and to Paris to see the catacombs, Musee Fragonard, and Pere LaChaise! She and my mom Donna Gritman drove me from Connecticut to Vermont to see the largest granite quarry in the world...

Maddy Biggs flew with me to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to see one of the premier documented human skeletal collections in the U.S. Katina Stockbridge and Janice Lane took me to a funeral museum and crematorium in rural Virginia. Chris Sweeters has accompanied me to the National Library of Medicine and the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

My sister and brother-in-law Melissa and Nicholas Heilweil brought me to the San Diego Museum of Man when I visited them in Santa Monica--and Melissa gave me a copy of Death in Yellowstone during a family trip, turning that into a field trip, too!

My dad and stepmother Jim and Sarah Quigley have accompanied me to Illinois to see Dickson Mounds, BodyWorlds, and the Museum of Funeral Customs; to Florida to see a forensic lab; to a funeral home in Indiana to see a mummy; and to Boston to make a presentation.

Thanks, everybody! And thanks to those I may have inadvertently forgotten~

Museum behind the scenes

On the day I found the turn-of-the-century photograph of the 2 men making a death mask, I also found these historical images of staff working to put together displays at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. The photos above link to further information about each one, but the treasure trove is here. Between prints, negatives, and lantern slides, the AMNH holds over 1 million images in their photographic archives, so they call this on-line exhibit "small" and promise to add the entire collection to it.

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I first heard of the AMNH "Picturing the Museum" exhibit on one of my favorite websites Curious Expeditions. One of the writers of that site, Dylan Thuras, has teamed up with the founder of the Athanasius Kircher Society, Joshua Foer, to launch an incredible new website Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities & Esoterica. The Atlas Obscura includes many of the places I have blogged about, including the Paris Catacombs, the Mutter Museum, and the Sedlec Ossuary. Since many of my readers have been to or know about equally strange and wondrous places, I encourage you - as they have encouraged me - to visit, comment, and contribute!

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I've been on "behind the scenes" visits to several museums, some of which have entries in the Atlas Obscura - the National Museum of Health and Medicine, the Mutter Museum, the San Diego Museum of Man, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History - and can personally vouch for the fact that that they are even more fascinating from the back side than the front. Did you know that most museums only have room to display about 10% of their collections?

Einstein timeline

 

German-born genius Albert Einstein died at the age of 76 in 1955. Here is list of posthumous dates associated with the physicist's famous brain:

1955: An autopsy was performed at Princeton Hospital by Dr. Thomas Harvey (2nd image), who removed the 1230g brain for study, took it to the University of Pennsylvania, and spent the next 3 months sectioning, mounting, and staining hundreds of microscope slides. Harvey retained 2 sets for his own research and distributed the other 10 to pathologists of his choice. After learning of this, Einstein's family granted retroactive permission for the removal and study of the brain, provided the results were only published in scientific journals and were not sensationalized. (Read more about Dr. Harvey's career here.)

1978: Journalist Steven Levy interviewed Dr. Harvey, then living in Wichita, Kansas, and published an article in New Jersey Monthly entitled, "I Found Einstein's Brain."

1994: Japanese math professor Sugimoto Kenji of Kinki University tracks down the brain. In the documentary Relics: Einstein's Brain, he asks Harvey for a specimen of the brain, to which Harvey consents and slices off a portion of the brain-stem (watch clip here).

1998: Harvey delivered the remaining uncut portion of Einstein's brain to Princeton pathologist Dr. Elliot Krauss, who analyzed it and found parts of it to have a higher proportion of glial cells than the average male brain.

2000: Michael Paterniti publishes the memoir Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain about his cross-country journey in the late 1990s with Dr. Harvey to return the brain to Einstein's granddughhter (read excerpt here, review here).

2005: On the 50th anniversary of Einstein's death, Harvey (by then 92) gave interviews about the brain from his home in New Jersey.

2010: Dr.  Harvey’s estate donated his Einstein specimens to the National Museum of Health an d Medicine.

Yesterday: The National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago, which began digitizing Harvey's collection earlier this year, offered the images and data about the specimens as an iPhone app. Said the app's designer Steve Landers, "I'd like to think Einstein would have been excited."

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For previous brain blogposts, start here:

Heslington brain

National Museum of Health and Medicine

I've made several references to the National Museum of Health and Medicine (a.k.a. the Army Medical Museum at Walter Reed) on this blog. Last time I was there was in October 2007 with my friend Chris Sweeters. Chris and I are pictured here with her husband, my much-missed morbid friend, Jim--James Cheyney Miller (1949-2005). When we were at the NMHM, a reporter from the local Fox News station was there to get his Halloween story about the "Museum of Death." He snagged me for a soundbite and I don't think I came off too badly.

Death masks

Making a plaster death mask, New York, c. 1908. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.


A plaster cast of the face and hands of theologian and religious reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546), made shortly after his death and now on exhibit at Luthers Sterbehaus [Luther's Death House] in Eisleben, Germany, where he spent the last few weeks of his life.

Cast of death mask of Australian wife-murderer Frederick Bailey Deeming, hanged at Old Melbourne Gaol in 1892. The shape of Deeming's skull was held by phrenologists to indicate that he was an innate criminal, but the judge in his case rejected his plea of insanity.

Death mask with wounds added, used as a visual aid to demonstrate the characteristics of incisions, lacerations, and stab wounds, c. 1965. New York City Medical Examiner's Collection, National Museum of Health and Medicine, Washington, D.C.

It is easier to make plaster molds of the faces of the dead than the living - they don't move and they don't require straws in the nostrils through which to breathe. I came across the top photo yesterday on one of my favorite blogs, Morbid Anatomy, in reference to the article "Death Doesn't Lie." Then began a lengthy search for more information about death masks, starting with the book cited in the comments to the Morbid Anatomy post. In Portraits in Plaster, American essayist and critic Laurence Hutton (1843-1904) documents his extensive collection of life and death masks - but in A Pictorial Guide by John Delaney, Princeton University Library has kindly digitized the entire array (click on the alphabet). Note that the cast of Abraham Lincoln's face - often mistakenly assumed to be made after his death, is correctly identified as a life mask, as is further explained on a blog called Project Death Mask. There are plenty of death masks to be found on the web - politicians, scientists, artists, writers, and particularly musicians - but they are also available for sale from Teardrop Memories if you want to hold one in your hands. I chose the images above to represent the reasons death masks have been made: not just sentimental, but historical, pseudoscientific, and forensic. They are the direct imprint of the human face, predating and paralleling photography. Hutton writes:

The value of a plaster cast as a portrait of the dead or living face cannot for a moment be questioned. It must, of necessity be absolutely true to nature. It cannot flatter; it cannot caricature. It shows the subject as he was, not only as others saw him, in the actual flesh, but as he saw himself. And in the case of the death-mask particularly, it shows the subject often as he permitted no one but himself to see himself. He does not pose; he does not "try to look pleasant." In his mask he is seen, as it were, with his mask off!

They may be so unflattering, in fact, that posterity prefers a print or photographic portrait...

The chair and the car

I was 10 weeks old when President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) was assassinated during the motorcade in Dallas. My Mom left me laying on the couch when a friend knocked at the door to tell her to turn on the TV, and I chose that moment to roll over for the very 1st time and fall on my head (according to family lore, that's "what happened" to me). The limousine in which the Kennedys and Texas governor John Connally (1917-1993) and his wife Nellie (1919-2006) were riding was not decommissioned until 1980. After the assassination, the 7,800lb midnight-blue 1961 Lincoln Continental was modified and reconditioned. Safety improvements included the addition of armor plates, bullet-proof glass, run-flat tires, and a hardtop to replace the removable bubble top. Now topping 9,800lbs, the limo was returned to service in 1964 and used by presidents Richard Nixon (1919-1994), Gerald Ford (1913-2006), and Jimmy Carter (b. 1924). It may now be seen at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

I grew up in Illinois - the "Land of Lincoln" - and have been to New Salem (click here for a virtual tour), his home and the Old State Capitol (click here for a virtual tour) in Springfield, and Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., where President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was assassinated. The chair in which he was shot, a black walnut rocker, was purchased at auction by an agent of Henry Ford and transported to his museum in Dearborn (click here for vintage footage of the chair being unpacked). I have not seen it, but have seen other Lincoln assassination artifacts at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Museum, the Mütter Museum, and the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

A Morning's Work

Bear with me as I blog about amputations again... You may be aware of the Burns Archive, a collection of vintage photographs - most of them medical or death-related. Collector Stanley B. Burns, M.D., has amassed more than 700,000 images, which he licenses. He has also published some remarkable books, including a volume of postmortem photos, Sleeping Beauty: The History of Memorial Photography in America, and a compilation of medical images, A Morning's Work: Medical Photographs from the Burns Archive & Collection, 1843-1939. The photograph above is from the latter collection and provided its title.

The 6" x 4 1/2" albumen print was made in 1865 by Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou (1824-1907). Dr. Bontecou was an avid proponent of photography and documented his cases for inclusion in the newly established Army Medical Museum (now the National Museum of Health and Medicine). He labeled this photo "A Morning's Work" because it reflects the typical number of amputations he performed in a single morning...

Leg bones

A favorite author of mine is Roald Dahl (1916-1990). He wrote children's books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but also wrote adult fiction, particularly some great short stories full of irony. I heard it mentioned yesterday that after he had his hip replaced, he kept part of his old thigh bone on his desk as a paperweight (I think I see it in the photo). The story reminds me of the shattered lower leg of Major General Daniel E. Sickles (1819-1914), which was amputated when damaged by a cannonball during the Civil War. He used to visit his leg bones at the Army Medical Museum, now the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where they can be seen to this day!

Morbid motorcycles

Thanks to former curator Paul Sledzik, I now know that the National Museum of Health and Medicine has an unofficial blog, appropriately named A Repository for Bottled Monsters. In my first few minutes of exploring, I found this anatomical motorcycle, and decided to couple that with some motorcycle hearses, which are also customized. The skeleton cycle was photographed at the Peterson Automotive Museum in L.A., but I hope it tears up the road every now and then. Motorcycle hearses do get out, but mainly to the cemetery!