The Morthouse

A few weeks ago I heard this story on NPR about the St. Cuthbert Gospel, Europe’s oldest intact book, which the British Library recently paid $14 million to acquire.

The book is thought to date from seventh-century England and is in astonishingly good condition. This may be due to the fact that for four of its many centuries the book was not in anyone’s hands, but rather tucked away inside the coffin of Saint Cuthbert. From Wikipedia:

The book takes its name from Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, North East England, in whose tomb it was placed, probably a few years after his death in 687. Although it was long regarded as Cuthbert’s personal copy of the Gospel, to which there are early references, and so a relic of the saint, the book is now thought to date from shortly after Cuthbert’s death. It was probably a gift from Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey, where it was written, intended to be placed in St Cuthbert’s coffin when his remains were placed behind the altar at Lindisfarne in 698. It presumably remained in the coffin through its long travels after 875, forced by Viking invasions, ending at Durham Cathedral. The book was found inside the coffin and removed in 1104 when the burial was once again moved within the cathedral. It was kept there with other relics, and important visitors were able to wear the book in a leather bag around their necks. 

Image: Miniature from Bede’s Prose Life of St Cuthbert (late 12th century), depicting the discovery of St. Cuthbert’s incorrupt corpse, via Wikipedia.

The Search for Etan Patz

FBI and NYPD investigators are excavating the basement at 127 Prince Street in SoHo for the remains of six-year-old Etan Patz, who disappeared while walking to his bus stop in  1979—the first time he was allowed to walk alone.

Etan was the first missing child to be pictured on a milk carton, and the day of his disappearance, May 25, became National Missing Children’s Day.

This article in the Times looks at the science behind the new search and includes some quotes from Dr. Michael Baden, medical examiner for the City at the time of Etan’s disappearance:

What may have survived after all these years and the effects of the moisture of the soil and the bacteria from decomposition?

“There probably would still be bone,” Dr. [Michael] Baden said. “The permanent teeth that we have, more so than baby teeth, last for decades. Longer than that. It’s easy to get DNA from teeth and long bones.” 

[…]

There could still be hair. “That definitely would provide DNA,” Dr. Baden said. Any blood spilled would have long decomposed, he said, but investigators will surely be looking for signs of insect activity.

“Maggots can have the DNA of an individual,” from feeding on a body, Dr. Baden said. The pupae cases left behind from hatching flies could contain the body’s DNA, he said.

See also:

• Search for Boy’s Body Returns to Cellar That Looked Uneven Decades Earlier (NYT)
• Amid Inquiry, SoHo Recalls Less-Fashionable Past (NYT)
• Officials Resume Search For Boy Missing Since 1979 (NPR)

Image: Etan Patz in 1978. Photograph by his father, Stanley K. Patz. Via Wikipedia.

Titanic Links

I’m sure the Internet has mercilessly pounded this information into your skull the last week or so, but yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

Here are a few articles and radio stories that have popped up:

• The New York Times article “Experts Split on Possibility of Remains at Titanic Site” examines the open question, Are there any bodies in there?: “‘I would not be surprised if highly preserved bodies were found in the engine room,’ [Robert Ballard, one of the discoverers of the Titanic wreck] said. ‘That was deep inside the ship.’ Asked how many bodies the broken hull of the Titanic might hold, Dr. Ballard replied: ‘Dozens. Hundreds starts to feel uncomfortable. I know that lots landed on the bottom, because there are so many shoes.’”
• Which leads me to this nice little piece by Robert Krulwich: “The Strange Persistence of Shoes at Sea.”
• “Remembering the Titanic’s Intrepid Bandleader” (NPR) profiles the dapper Wallace Hartley, leader of the doomed eight-member band that continued to play as the ship sank.
• “Why Didn’t Passengers Panic on the Titanic?” (from NPR’s Planet Money crew) looks at how the length of time it took the ship to sink resulted in the preservation of social norms: “Given time, societal conventions can trump our natural self-interest. A hundred years ago, women and children always went first. Men were stoic. On the Titanic, there was enough time for these norms to assert themselves.”
• “Remembering Titanic: Where the Passengers Are Buried,” on the Times’ City Room blog features the following two sentences: “Ms. Olsen said that for many people whose friends died on the Titanic, the grief was lasting. Across from the Straus mausoleum is a monument built by an heiress to a laxative fortune.”

Today’s Links

Thought I’d start doing link-roundup posts somewhere on the spectrum between occasional and frequent. This is the kind of stuff I already post on Facebook and Twitter, so if you like this sort of thing, consider liking and/or following me over theres.

Here you go:

• Summer was the most dangerous time for Tudors (BBC News): Fun ways to die in Tudor England! Best sentence: “Dr Gunn’s previous study highlighted a number of strange ways that people died, in accidents involving archery, dancing bears and early handguns.”
• Police plea on macabre book find (BBC News): A 300-year-old ledger bound in human skin, found in the middle of a road in Leeds. “In the 18th and 19th Centuries it was common to bind accounts of murder trials in the killer’s skin —known as anthropodermic bibliopegy.”
• NPR did a story on what can happen to our Facebook and Flickr accounts when we go to the Big Cloud in the Sky.
• If you aren’t already following Caitlin Doughty on Twitter or Facebook, you should be.

Have missing Civil War sailors in your family tree? The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary is looking for your help identifying these two fellas:

These are facial reconstructions from skeletons found in the wreck of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, which sank in 1862.

I heard about this on NPR. Listen to the story. There are so many interesting things about this, including the fact that they were able to recover any remains at all from a 150-year-old shipwreck, including some soft tissue.

Top image: Crewmen of the USS Monitor pictured in July 1862. Library of Congress, via NPR.
Bottom two images: Louisiana State University, via NPR.

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)

I’m a big listener of podcasts when driving around town or at the gym, and this weekend I scored a winner (and so can you!) with the newest edition of Freakonomics Radio: “The Suicide Paradox,” an hour-long look at suicide. Check it out. You can stream it from their site, or download it for free.

Image: NYC - Metropolitan Museum of Art - Death of Socrates (Jacques-Louis David, 1787) by wallyg on Flickr. (Via Freakonomics Radio.)