The Morthouse

“John Brown’s Body” (you’ve heard this song in some form even if you don’t recognize the title) was a Union marching song during the Civil War:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;

His soul’s marching on!

Brown, abolitionist and engineer of the raid on Harper’s Ferry, was hanged on December 2, 1859. From Wikipedia:

On the morning of December 2, Brown wrote: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” He read his Bible and wrote a final letter to his wife, which included his will. At 11:00 he was escorted from the county jail through a crowd of 2,000 soldiers a few blocks away to a small field where the gallows were. Among the soldiers in the crowd were future Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth, who borrowed a militia uniform to gain admission to the execution. The poet Walt Whitman, in “Year of Meteors,” described viewing the execution.

Brown was accompanied by the sheriff and his assistants, but no minister since he had consistently rejected the ministrations of pro-slavery clergy. […] He elected to receive no religious services in the jail or at the scaffold. He was hanged at 11:15 a.m. and pronounced dead at 11:50 a.m. His body was placed in a wooden coffin with the noose still around his neck.

Image: John Brown’s Grave at North Elba, N.Y. [Reverse side.] by New York Public Library on Flickr. Ca 1870.

Just read this super-cool post on super-cool blog BibliOdyssey about the Antikamnia Chemical Company and their calendar images from the turn of the last century. There are a ton more images like the one above (most of them are less racist), all by pharmacist/printer/artist Louis Crucius.

Some background from BibliOdyssey:

While he was studying he worked in a pharmacy and made humorous sketches that were placed in the window of the store. A collection of these drawings was published in 1893 (‘Funny Bones’). He lectured in histology and anatomy and eventually came to be a Professor of Anatomy but died in 1898 from kidney tumours.

Although he gave most of his drawings away, Crucius sold a number of them to the Antikamnia (‘opposed to pain’) Chemical Company which had been established in St Louis in 1890. They produced antikamnia medicines containing the coal tar derivative, acetanilid, an anti-fever drug with pain relieving properties somewhat related to paracetamol, but which would be later shown to be a toxic compound not to mention addictive. Antikamnia was mixed with substances like codeine and quinine to enhance the pain relieving effects.

30 of the Crucius ‘dance of death’-inspired drawings were used to make 5 years worth of Antikamnia Chemical Company calendars - between 1897 and 1901. They had a fairly aggressive marketing campaign in which the calendars (aimed at the medical fraternity) as well as postcards and sample packs were distributed to doctors in the United States and overseas.

My great-great-grandfather was a pharmacist in Hardwick, Vermont, around this time. I wonder if he was familiar with these calendars.

Image: The Antikamnia Company 1901 (An Old Negro Melody) by peacay on Flickr.

chocolateoatmilk asked: Hi, I'm always on the lookout for new podcasts and am therefore wondering whether you have any other recommendations than the one from Freakonomics? Anything else within 'the ossuary'-theme you'd feel comfortable to share? (: Other than that I'd like to say that I'm a conservation student, and I really enjoy your tumblr!

Thank you for your kind words, and: why, yes! I do have some podcast recommendations. However, they generally don’t satisfy my morbid urges, just my general curiosity and nerdiness. Here are some lists.

Informative and/or Entertaining (many of these are simply NPR shows that are available in podcast format):

• Radiolab
• This American Life (I highly recommend their iPhone app; it’s only $3 or so and it lets you stream all their programs)
• On The Media
• Stuff You Should Know (co-host Josh seems fascinated with death, dying, and corpses, and a number of their shows reflect that—see my additional list below)
• Stuff You Missed in History Class (they alerted me to the existence of Henry IV’s severed and partially mummified head)
• Stuff Mom Never Told You
• BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects
• Planet Money
• Marketplace Money (nerdy personal finance stuff)
• The Moth
• Studio 360
• Ricky Gervais

As I mentioned above, Stuff You Should Know has a number of death-related episodes. Here’s a list of those, along with their dates so that you can find them more easily on iTunes:

• Cryonics, 8/30/11
• How Shrunken Heads Work, 6/23/11
• Do You Stay Conscious After Being Decapitated?, 4/26/11
• How Mummies Work, 3/15/11
• How Crime Scene Photography Works, 2/17/11
• How Blood Pattern Analysis Works, 2/15/11
• How the Black Death Worked, 2/10/11
• How Crime Scene Clean-Up Works, 9/7/10
• How Cremation Works, 8/31/10
• How Near Death Experiences Work, 12/3/09
• How Jack the Ripper Worked, 10/29/09
• Do Zombies Really Exist?, 9/24/09
• What Is a Body Farm?, 7/16/09
• Is Spontaneous Human Combustion Real?, 5/28/09
• What Causes Rigor Mortis?, 5/12/09
• Bizarre Ways to Die, 4/2/09
• Are There Dead Bodies on Mount Everest?, 3/26/09
• Can People Really Die of Fright?, 2/24/09
• What Can Be Done with a Dead Body, 12/18/08

And, finally, here are some music podcasts I like:

• Werdemup (podcast of Isaiah Toothtaker and other members of Machina Muerte)
• Mad Decent
• Low End Theory (especially the installments featuring Gaslamp Killer)

This is the tomb of Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) in Eisenstadt, Austria. If the tomb looks a little more modern than you’d expect, you’d not be wrong. Turns out this tomb was built in 1932, and Haydn’s full remains weren’t interred here until 1954, almost a century and a half after the composer’s death.

Haydn had a wacky posthumous journey. He was originally buried in a cemetery outside Vienna. Soon after, however, two men, Joseph Carl Rosenbaum and Johann Nepomuk Peter, somewhat deviously managed to exhume him and take his head, motivated by their interest in phrenology. From Wikipedia:

The process of stealing the head was, apparently, not pleasant, since decomposition had set in and the smell was strong. However, Peter and Rosenbaum succeeded in cleaning the skull and duly carried out their phrenological examination. Peter declared that “the bump of music” in Haydn’s skull was indeed “fully developed”. Afterward, Peter kept it in a handsome custom-made black wooden box, with a symbolic golden lyre at the top, glass windows, and a white cushion.

In 1820, Haydn’s old patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II was inadvertently reminded by the chance remark of an acquaintance that he had forgotten to carry through his plan of having Haydn’s remains transferred from Gumpendorf to the family seat in Eisenstadt. When the remains were exhumed, the Prince was furious to find that they included no skull, and quickly deduced that Peter and Rosenbaum were responsible. However, through a series of devious maneuvers Peter and Rosenbaum managed to maintain possession of the skull. With both men’s houses due to be searched, Peter gave the skull to Rosenbaum, who hid it in a straw mattress. During the search of Rosenbaum’s house, his wife Therese lay on the bed and claimed to be menstruating—with the result that the searchers did not go near the mattress. Eventually Rosenbaum gave Prince Esterházy a different skull.

After this, the skull passed through many different hands, and it wasn’t until two decades after a descendant of Prince Esterházy built the tomb shown above that Haydn’s skull was reunited with the rest of his remains.

This saga has been on my brain for twenty years or so, from back in the days when I was a nerd-olescent obsessed not just with archaeology and forensic anthrolopology, but Mozart as well. In recent years, however—with the exhumation of Mozart’s relatives and some DNA testing—the story’s come to a less than conclusive conclusion. Most likely, this is not the skull of Mozart, but it remains a fascinating story. From Atlas Obscura:  

In 1902 the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, came into possession of what was said to be Mozart’s skull. Missing its lower jaw, this skull matched a historical record indicating that Joseph Rothmayer, a gravedigger, had taken the skull from the group grave in which Mozart was buried ten years after his death in 1791.

So it was with great excitement that in 2006, 104 years after acquiring it, the Mozarteum was planning to prove once and for all that it possessed Mozart’s skull. The plan was to test the skull’s DNA against the DNA of Mozart’s relatives, taken from his maternal grandmother and niece’s thigh bones. The results were dismaying.

Using mitochondrial DNA, the results suggested that not only was the skull unrelated to the Mozart family’s remains, but that the remains were unrelated to each other, casting doubt on the the family remains as well. Due to the confusion, the result was neither negative nor positive, but entirely inconclusive.

Perhaps the best case for the skull’s being Mozart’s is the fact that the skull shows that it took a hard hit about a year before its owner died. This would be consistent with the headaches that Mozart described in his last year of life and would provide some additional explanation of his early death. But this too is ultimately speculative, and the mystery of Mozart’s skull will, for the time being, remains unsolved.

Though still at the Mozarteum, the skull is no longer on display, as it unnerved a number of the docents. However, with an advance request, a showing of the skull may be given.