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Showing posts with label morgue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morgue. Show all posts
Friday, July 13, 2012
Mortuary on the market
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Waking up in the morgue
I have difficulty distinguishing between a trope and a meme, but I guess the idea of waking up in the morgue qualifies as the latter - except that it really does happen! Here are a few examples from around the world:
Maryland, U.S.A., 2010 When police were called to check on Ruth Shillinglaw Johnson, 89, they encountered a motionless body and "a decomposition smell," so they did not check for a pulse. They notified Johnson's adult son of the death of his mother, whom he knew wished to donate her body to science. A State Anatomy Board employee arrived 3 hours later to remove the body. It was at that time that Johnson took a deep breath and moved her arm. She was rushed to a hospital, and has since been moved to a hospice.
Jablonowo, Poland, 2009 The husband of an 84-year-old woman who had fallen unconscious called an ambulance and a responding EMS doctor pronounced her dead. "A funeral company took the body to the morgue. Several hours later, a worker there noticed the bag containing the body was moving. He called a doctor who noted the woman's vital functions had returned," said a spokesman for the police, who were investigating the incident.
Anandpur Sahib, India, 2008 Mange Ram passed out when he was crushed by a stampede of people that killed 146. "When I woke up, I was in the middle of a row of bodies waiting for postmortem," the 19-year-old said, shivering. His request for water startled the staff of the civil hospital. Eyewitnesses said there was such confusion after the trample at the Naina Devi shrine that procedures for pronouncing death and identifying victims were not followed. Those who had suffocated and those who were merely unconscious were bundled into available vehicles and driven the 18 km to the nearest medical facility, some of them dying en route.
La Victoria, Venezuela, 2007 Carlos Camejo (pictured with document authorizing his autopsy), was declared dead after a highway accident. He was taken to the morgue, but bled when the medical examiner made an incision to begin a post-mortem examination. "I woke up because the pain was unbearable," said the 33-year-old.
North Carolina, U.S.A. 2005 Larry Green was hit by a car while walking across a highway. He was put into a body bag and sent to the morgue, and the medical examiner did not notice he was still alive until 2½ hours after the accident. "The medical examiner is called after death. Someone else pronounced his death, and the medical examiner is called to investigate the cause and manner of that death. He does not pronounce people dead," said M.E. J.B. Perdue in defense of his alleged disregard of Green's vital signs. After it was discovered that he was still alive, Green spent 2 months in the hospital recovering from his injuries, which include brain damage.
Yikes.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Morgue overcrowding
A Scene in the New York Morgue -- Identification of the Unknown Dead, a wood engraving sketched by Stanley Fox and published in Harper's Weekly, July 7, 1866.Morgues have all too frequently been known to reach capacity. Most recently in Haiti after the earthquake, the morgue quickly filled up with victims who soon filled the parking lot out front. New York City also faced an overflow after the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001. The economic crisis has affected the Detroit, Michigan, morgue, which is using 67 large freezers on trailers outside the building to store the bodies that remain unclaimed because their families can't afford to bury them. The Laukota Hospital morgue in Fiji is also having issues with family members neglecting to claim their dead. In the summer of 2006, the morgue in Fresno, California, reached capacity with the bodies of elderly victims of a 2-week heatwave. An 8-day heatwave in Adelaide, South Australia, filled the city morgue to capacity. Occasionally, filled morgues result in bodies that begin to decompose before they can be accomodated or are otherwise mishandled, as in Huddinge, Sweden, and in Jabiru and Gunbalanya, Northern Territory, Australia.
The grounds of Bellevue Hospital - the oldest public hospital (founded in 1736) - housed New York City's first morgue, and it is still the official mortuary for New York County and the location of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner: "About 20,000 bodies pass each year through Bellevue's morgue, 8,500 of which are never claimed. All unclaimed bodies are photographed and described, and a docket entered for them at the Police Department's Bureau of Missing Persons. After reposing for two weeks or more in refrigerated vaults of the morgue, some of the cadavers are given to private embalming schools whose students practice in a room adjoining the vaults, and a certain number are allotted to medical schools for dissection. The remainder, about 170 a week, are placed in plain, wooden coffins and carried on a barge, up the East River to Potter's Field on Hart's Island." Ironically, when 49-year-old Angel Britto died of natural causes in November 2009 after serving as an officer at Bellevue Hospital for 14 years, his body lay in the hospital's morgue for 2 months until it was claimed by his fellow officers. One of them said, "He didn't have any family and we refused to let him go to potter's field."
Friday, October 9, 2009
Morgue news
Morgues and mortuaries have been much in the news lately. Some are suffering from the economy, one is too lax with removals, and another has geared up for my favorite holiday at the end of the month....
Detroit, Michigan The Wayne Co. Morgue in midtown is piling up with bodies that have remained unclaimed by family members who can't afford to bury or cremate them and unburied by the county since their $21,000 budget ran out in June. The freezer's occupancy (67) has tripled since 2000. "We see people here [who] society was not taking care of before they died - and society is having difficulty taking care of them after they are dead," says the chief medical examiner.
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Sydney, Australia Authorities have been forced to reopen the Westmead Hospital morgue because - as was predicted - the Glebe Dept. of Forensic Medicine does not have the capacity to store the current number of bodies awaiting identification, notification of next of kin, and autopsy. "This is further evidence the Rees Labor Government got it wrong when it closed the Westmead Morgue last year despite staff warning Glebe morgue could not cope." In another recent news report out of Sydney, funeral directors are faulting the Royal North Shore Hospital for its cavalier attitude toward security at its morgue. After a recent removal from the unlocked and unattended morgue, an unnamed mortician stated, "I was aghast...at the ease with which we were able to do this. There are not locked doors, no checks, no security cameras. It is my opinion that a body could easily be stolen and I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already."
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New Orleans, Louisiana A haunted house on Canal Street called "The Mortuary" opened for the season on Sept. 11th. It is housed in an 1887 mansion that was the home of McMahon & Sons Funeral Home from 1920 to the late 1990s, and is surrounded by the above-ground cemeteries that New Orleans is known for. "You couldn't ask for a better view," said owner Jeff Borne, as he gazed out the window at the vast expanse of tombs.
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Pasadena, California The Eden Bar & Grill (formerly the Holly Street Bar & Grill) occupies what used to be the Turner & Stevens Mortuary. "Pasadenans like to startle their friends by revealing that the building was once a mortuary. If it's any comfort, the dining room was the garage." I have not eaten at a mortuary restaurant, but I did once attend a party at a former funeral home - the beer was kept on ice in the casket that still remained in the living room!
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If interested, check out the series "Post Mortem" by German photographer Patrick Budenz.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Morgues and such
The image at the top is a group of medical students gathered around the cadaver they are dissecting. It is in a new book that I ordered minutes after I heard about it and only a couple of hours before my sister also clued me in. I own two similar photographs. In one of them, the students are wearing smocks bearing the year of their graduation, and with the photo was a graduation invitation. I made the mistake of letting the two get separated, but intend to reunite them when I put my Museum back together..
The second image is compliments of new follower Carrie, who writes, "I don't know if you have ever seen the photography of Shaun O'Boyle. I came across his work looking up the old Buffalo psychiatric hospital since I'm from Buffalo (now living in Glasgow, Scotland) and used drive past that gorgeous old building all the time." The photos are beautiful and haunting and the artist's statement can be read here.
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The third image was published in Harper's Weekly in 1874. The Paris morgue was a popular amusement and tourist attraction in the 19th c., and was on the visitor's itinerary along with the Eiffel Tower. The word morgue itself is directly from French:
morgueAccording to other definitions, a morgue is a place where corpses are awaiting identification and a mortuary is where corpses are awaiting funeralization.
"mortuary," 1821, from Fr. Morgue, originally a specific building in Paris where bodies were exposed for identification; originally the place where new prisoners were displayed to keepers to establish their identification. Probably from morgue "haughtiness," originally "a sad expression, solemn look," from O.Fr. morguer "look solemnly," from V.L. *murricare "to make a face, pout," from *murrum "muzzle, snout."
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