The Morthouse

I focus on human, not animal, death on this site, but this was too human not to post.

Cat burial scene, 1925. Weir, Québec. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

“The Stubborn Child”

From the Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes:

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him, and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

Lovely: A visit to Yosemite Cemetery by rare book librarian Megan Curran, over on The Order of the Good Death.

By far the most beautiful grave in Yosemite Cemetery belongs to another teenager who succumbed to a fall. Effie Maud Crippen was aged “14 years 7 mos 22 days” according to her tombstone, when “she faltered by the wayside and the angels took her home.”

cavetocanvas:

David Hockney, My Mother, Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire, Nov. 82 #4, 1982

Mourner at the Grave, Albumen Carte de Visite, Circa 1863 by lisby1 on Flickr.

“Copied by the London Photographic Compy., 1B Norfolk Terrace, Bayswater W., and 304 Regent Street W.”

This is a mass-produced sentimental image. The woman, dressed in widow’s mourning, laments at a real grave—however, it is too old a grave to be any of any freshly lost relative of her own. Thanks to modern technology the inscription can be read as “In affectionate remembrance of Frederick William Paige…who departed this life September 11, 1814, age 35.”

Thank you to sannazay for suggesting the new name “The Morthouse” on Facebook.

His pictures of Boston make me a little nostalgic for my grad school days, when I lived there.

sannazay:

Though Neptunes waves & Boreas blasts
Have tost me to and fro
Now well escaped from all their rage
I’m anchored here below

vintagegal:

(via luxulterior)

This is a watchtower in Dalkeith Cemetery, near Edinburgh, Scotland. It was built in 1827, when folks—particularly in Scottish communities near the medical schools in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen—felt a real need to have their dead protected, and those with enough money were able to do something about it.

The well publicized crimes of the Williams Burke and Hare in 1827 and 1828—men who escalated body-snatching from mere grave-robbing to actual murder—didn’t help, either. Some communities built structures called morthouses to temporarily house the dead as they made their journey from freshness to putrefaction. This one is in Udny, in Aberdeenshire:

This particular morthouse is unique because of its clever design. Inside was a sort of lazy Susan for the dead. From Geograph: 

This circular stone building houses a revolving wheel upon which a coffin would be placed and kept securely under lock and key. When another body was deposited, the wheel would be turned slightly to accommodate the new coffin. Eventually, when a coffin had been rotated one full revolution, it could safely be buried because the corpse would be sufficiently decomposed as to be of no use to the body-snatchers.

Top image: Photograph by Kim Traynor, via Wikipedia.
Bottom image: Lynette and Malcolm Johnson, via Geograph.

The Rise of the Mortsafe

Mo medical schools, mo problems.

About 200 years ago, the expansion of medical schools meant a growing need for bodies suitable for dissection. From Wikipedia: 

Before the Anatomy Act of 1832, the only legal supply of corpses for anatomical purposes in the UK were those condemned to death and dissection by the courts. Those who were sentenced to dissection by the courts were often guilty of comparatively harsher crimes. Such sentences did not provide enough subjects for the medical schools and private anatomical schools (which did not require a licence before 1832). While during the 18th century hundreds had been executed for trivial crimes, by the 19th century only about 55 people were being sentenced to capital punishment each year. However, with the expansion of the medical schools, as many as 500 cadavers were needed. 

Before electric power to supply refrigeration, bodies would decay rapidly and become unusable for study. Therefore, the medical profession turned to body snatching to supply the deficit of bodies fresh enough to be examined.

Stealing a corpse was only a misdemeanour at common law, not a felony, and was therefore only punishable with fine and imprisonment, rather than transportation or execution. The trade was a sufficiently lucrative business to run the risk of detection, particularly as the authorities tended to ignore what they considered a necessary evil.

The mortsafe was invented in the early nineteenth century to protect graves from the so-called “Resurrection Men” who plied this trade. Mortsafes were contraptions of iron and/or stones that essentially served as re-usable, coffin-sized padlocks: to make the graves of the newly dead inaccessible for as long as it took for their bodies to putrefy past the point of medical “usefulness.” (Morbid Anatomy wrote a really good post about mortsafes a while back, by the way.)

A few mortsafes are still on display in some churchyards in Scotland. Not coincidentally, these churchyards were near medical schools.

Mortsafe (in the form of an iron coffin) in Colinton Kirkyard, outside Edinburgh. Photograph by Kim Traynor.

Mortsafe in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh. Photograph by Kim Traynor. 

malformalady:

Casket unearthed by Katrina flood waters.

Exhumation

deathlydame:

The digging up of a buried body is called exhumation, and is considered sacrilege by most cultures that bury their dead. However, there is often a number of circumstances in which exhumation is tolerated:

• If an individual died under suspicious circumstances, a legitimate investigating agency (such as a police agency) may exhume the body to determine the cause of death.
• A body may be exhumed so that it may be reburied elsewhere.

Once human remains reach a certain age, many cultures consider the remains to have no communal provenance, making exhumation acceptable. This serves several purposes:

• Many cemeteries have a limited number of plots in which to bury the dead. Once all plots are full, older remains are typically moved to an ossuary to accommodate more bodies.
• It enables archaeologists to search for human remains in order to better understand human culture.
• It enables construction agencies to clear the way for new infrastructure.

Frequently, cultures have different sets of exhumation taboos. Occasionally these differences result in conflict, especially in cases where a culture with more lenient exhumation rules wishes to operate on the territory of a stricter culture. For example, United States construction companies have run into conflict with Native American groups that wanted to preserve their ancient burial grounds from any form of modern construction.

Rituals

In folklore and mythology, exhumation has also been frequently associated with the performance of rites to banish undead manifestations. An example is the Mercy Brown Vampire Incident of Rhode Island, which occurred in 1892.

Excarnation

Excarnation consists of exhumating the remnants to give them to animals. It was probably part of the bronze age death rites. Dogs and other scavengers gnawed on human corpses, reducing most of the bones to small fragments in the process.

Since ancient times, Zoroastrians have disposed of their dead by leaving the corpses in the open air, to be devoured by carnivorous birds and beasts. The Towers of Silence (Doongerwadi) have existed in Bombay since 1673. In modern Bombay there can be no beasts, but the vultures remain, ready to swoop down at the appointed times for their daily meals.

Secondary death rituals

In these rites, the body is treated one way and additional remains are treated another. For example, in modern, rural, south China, the corpse is buried with ceremony. After enough time has passed for the flesh to decompose, the bones are exhumed, cleansed, ritualized again then reburied.

It is suggested that dual rituals serve dual purposes with the specific purposes varying among cultures. When considering the dual rituals of contemporary Western cremations, it may be that one ritual addresses “community or family problems of social reintegration and the other resolves personal problems of bereavement.

(Source: deardeath.com)

John Everett Millais, The Vale Of Rest, 1858-59. Tate Museum, London. Via WikiPaintings.

From the Tate’s website:

Of all the pictures that Millais created, this was his favourite. […] The nun on the left is digging a grave, which is positioned in such as way that the viewer appears to be in it alongside her. The second nun’s rosary has a skull attached to it. In the background a coffin-shaped cloud—a harbinger of death, according to Scots legend—appears in the evening sky. […]

One October evening, he was so taken by the beauty of the sunset that he fetched a large canvas and set to work immediately. Following the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic of truth to nature, he painted the bulk of the picture, including the figures, in the open air. The setting—excluding the tombstones, but including the terrace, shrubs and the wall in the background, with poplars and oak trees behind it—was Effie’s [Millais’ wife’s] family’s garden at Bowerswell, Perth. […] The grave and gravestones were painted some months later at Kinnoull old churchyard in Perth.

averring:

As pretty as this is, don’t let them bury me, please.

(Source: weheartit.com)