German photographer Mark Steinmetz’s photo-essay on the plastination process invented by Gunther von Hagens’, whose BodiesBody Worlds exhibit tours the world nauseating and fascinating people in equal measure. In the top photo von Hagens examines the corpse of a 77-year-old woman who died of lung cancer. The second shows eighteen slices of plastinated brain being cured under ultraviolet light. The black stains are the massive hemorrhage that killed the donor. The rest of the set, which includes a fantastic photo of von Hagens using a band-saw to slice a cadaver into paper-thin sheets, is equally as fascinating but may be unsafe for the workplace.
The New Yorker has a fascinating article up about the itch, what it is and attempts by medicine to understand how it works. Throughout the article is the story of a woman named M. who, after a long series of misfortunes, develops an itch that she cannot rid herself of. An itch that proves costly:
“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
I find it maddening enough to have a mosquito bite that refuses to be tamed by the dull ends of my fingers; an itch of such epic proportions that it compels me to erode a hole in my skull is well beyond my ken.
Some cells have mattresses, others blankets, still others bare floors. None that we had seen (and we found these cells in each institution visited) had either a bed, a washstand, or a toilet. What we did find in one cell was a thirteen or fourteen year old boy, nude, in a corner of a starkly bare room, lying on his own urine and feces. The boy had been in solitary confinement for several days for committing a minor institutional infraction.
In December, 1965 Dr. Burton Blatt and his friend Fred Kaplan, a photographer, visited “five state institutions for the mentally retarded”. Kaplan was armed with a small camera attached to his belt, which he used to surreptitiously take photographs during their tours. The finished photo essay, which they titled “Christmas in Purgatory: A Photographic Essay On Mental Retardation”, is a harrowing catalog of loneliness and despair; the reader being saved from its crushing weight only by its last collection of photos from The Seaside, an institution in Connecticut, whose program is cited here as an example of proper, institutional care. The entire book can be viewed at the link below, as well as hundreds of others chronicling the history of mental and physical disabilities.
Has an elderly member of your family recently gone from berating kids for standing on their lawn to berating unicorns instead? When you visit do they brandish their cane and swear to defend their special, magic combs to the death? If so, remember:
“For prompt control of the agitated, belligerent senile…THORAZINE”
The Chinese, for all their questionable practices, have at the very least seen fit to make it easier for English speaking tourists visiting their country, a prime example of which is pictured above. How else is a female visitor supposed to know in which direction she should turn in order to have lady-bits looked at? The Chinese know that not all Westerners are of a level of intelligence or education to know what the acronym OB/GYN stands for, let alone what medical arts a gynecologist practices. With this in mind the hospital did the only thing it could in such a situation, using the diction that even the most moronic Occidental outlander would understand: obscenities. In turn it becomes crystal clear where the speculum wielders can be found.
Conversely the department of “Fetal Heart Custody” brings to mind a wing of the hospital full of labyrinthine corridors and rows of bank-teller windows manned by the dour faced, low-level minions of some Kafka-esque bureaucracy dealing in prenatal cardiovascular systems in which parents desperately run from window to window in a futile effort to fill out all the proper paperwork necessary for completing the construction of their infant; an image that may possibly be closer to the truth than I realize.
“It happens two hunred an’ fifty thousan’ times a yea’. Where is your daughta tonight?”
Fifteen year-old Arlene-Sue is irresistible. She knows that “you have to put out if you’re gonna get back”, and she’s gone “all the way”. She knows that the best way to get a man is by seductively feasting on fried chicken. “She turned brother against brutha” and it was going to catch up with her eventually. After a tryst with a trucker she’s chased down and taught a lesson by an entire gang. Thankfully, we are informed that once we follow fifteen year-old Arlene-Sue as she gets into trouble we’ll also join her as she is educated about pregnancy, ostensibly by a woman who interned under Ilsa during her stint with the SS. The saga of Arlene-Sue is the story of our time. It is not to be missed.
Christopher Conte splits his time between designing artificial limbs for amputees and creating intricate, biomechanical sculptures using mostly found materials, like Singer sewing machine components.
Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a contact lens that integrates a biologically safe circuit into its design. The circuit will allow for a myriad number of possibilities such as giving pilots or drivers info on their speed projected onto their windshield or to help the vision impaired.
Of course, the lenses can also be applied to entertainment and communications purposes. They would allow videogame designers to completely immerse the player in their virtual world. One would be able to browse the internet on a floating display that only the wearer could see. I can only pray that these appear soon; I look forward to posting “Your Daily WTF”, knowing that, somewhere, perhaps on a park bench, someone is staring, an expression of pained shock and horror on their face, as people walk past wondering if, perhaps, someone should get them some medical attention.
One of many pieces in the Prinzhorn Collection at the University of Heidelberg:
“The core collection comprises approximately 5000 pieces of art created by approx. 450 patients of psychiatric institutions. These pieces comprise mostly drawings, water colors, writings, like letters, notes, drafts of books and exercise books, which were often self-manufactured, as well as oil paintings, material manual work, collages and 70 wooden sculptures”
The collection inspired Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso among many other artists and features the work of mostly schizophrenic patients, between 1880 and 1933.
Jean Libbera “The Double Bodied Man” and his “brother Jacques. Truly a man of distinction he sports a fine handlebar. He married, had four children, and passed away in 1936 still possessed of both brother and follicular facial adornment.
Psychopathia Sexualis, by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing M.D., first printed in 1886, was the reference book for the spectrum of sexual deviance in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Krafft-Ebing, like many at the time, believed that the purpose of sexual desire was procreation, and any form of desire that didn’t go towards that ultimate goal was a perversion. Unsurprisingly, there are few case studies of women to be found here, the idea of a woman who engaged in sex for pleasure being a truly unwholesome one to the Victorian Gentleman. In the English translation, which one can read, in its entirety here, it reads: “Woman, however, if physically and mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire. If it were otherwise, marriage and family life would be empty words.”
It’s a fascinating read, and many of the “perversions” will seem tame to anyone who has spent two or three minutes on the internet, but there are some gems. Consider, if you will, the plight of “X” in Case 99:
“X., aged twenty, inverted sexually. Only loved men with large bushy mustaches. One day he met a man who was his ideal. He invited him to his home, but was unspeakably disappointed when the man removed an artificial mustache. Only when the visitor returned the ornament to his upper lip did he exercise his charm over X. once more and restored X. to complete virility.”
Unspeakably disappointed indeed. For those of you who parade about with your artificial moustaches, for shame. How can you live with yourselves knowing, as you must, that your filthy, follicular lies are harming the gay moustache fetishist community? Know that one day, you shall receive your comeuppance. There is only so much abuse they will take.
I love abandoned places…especially abandoned scientific establishments. You’d be amazed at the stuff that people will just leave behind. In Russia, the government literally left behind an entire neurological laboratory full of monkey brains in jars, half-mummified rat heads, and assorted other blocky, thrown-together Russian electronics. This place is like a candy store for zombies and medicophiles like myself.
The next time I’m in Russia (which would, technically, be the first I will have ever been in Russia), I plan to bust into this joint and abscond with a number of preserved brains and Frankensteinian Russki computer equipment. All part of my longterm plan to turn my house into an authenthic Mad Scientist’s Laboratory.
Ladies! Do you frequently suffer from the nervous vapors? Bouts of uncontrollable feminine hysteria? Well, then, Dr. John Robert’s Patented Electro-Massive Machine (a.k.a. The Electric Manipulator) For Curing Disease At Home is all you need to return yourself to a prim, proper maternal state. Simply apply the device to your unmentionables and thrill to the soothing electrical vibrations as they send you to the heights of curative ecstacy and gracefully (if privately) eliminate all manner of hysterical emotions!
For more information please consult the book The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, by Rachel Maines, or the film which it inspired, Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm. I’m sure ladies will be impressed by the depth of study that has gone into curing their hysteria (and filming it for “educational videos” in the San Fernando Valley of California, the capitol of electro-orgasmic research) and gentlemen will be intrigued by watching the emotional balm of orgasmic therapy applied to troubled young women who have just achieved the difficult age of eighteen. Remember, it’s all for the greater good of humanity!
Born around 1910 Mignon - The Penguin Girl (her birth name is believed to have been Ruth) suffered from a disorder known as phocomelia. Phocomelia is characterized by the stunting of limbs and the flipper like appearance of hands and feet. Her limbs forced her to waddle when she walked thereby completing her avian resemblance.
Her act, which consisted of the bikini clad Mignon playing a marimba, was featured at the 1933 “Century of Progress Exposition” in Chicago, as well as the 1939 and 1940 World’s Fairs, both in New York.
She married twice, once to a “normal” man with whom she had a “normal” child and the second time to one Earl Davis, known as “Hoppy the Frog Boy”. She disappeared into retirement in 1960, after which nothing is known of her life.
When Lakshmi Tatma was born, in a poverty-stricken region of Bihar, India, her mother believed she was “a miracle, a reincarnation” of the goddess Vishnu. It’s not hard to see why she would say this. You see, Lakshmi, was born with four extra, non-functional limbs.
This will soon change, however. Lakshmi will be undergoing a two hundred thousand dollar operation by a team of thirty surgeons, working in eight hour shifts, to separate her from her headless, parasitic twin, fused together at her pelvis.
Surely there is no doubt that this is the right, and only, option. However, one cannot help but wonder what life may have been like as the physical manifestation of a Hindu goddess.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
