The Morthouse

Today’s Links

Here you go. The first one is really important:

• Morbid Anatomy Library needs your help after severe water sprinkler damage following a fire in their Brooklyn building. They are accepting donations of money, time, talent, books, and artifacts.
• “Titanic vs. Lusitania: Who Survived and Why?”: Smithsonian takes a look at the two maritime disasters (from 1912 and 1915, respectively). Interesting: “The passengers of the Lusitania had less than 20 minutes before their ship sank, and in such a life-and-death situation, social scientists say, ‘self-interested reactions predominate.’ It didn’t matter what the captain ordered. […] The Titanic, though, sank slowly enough for social norms to hold sway.”
• This is very sad: “Taiwan Woman Commits Suicide While on Facebook” (via Order of the Good Death on, well, Facebook): “Lin’s last Facebook entries show her chatting with nine friends, alerting them to her gradual asphyxiation. One picture uploaded from her mobile phone depicts a charcoal barbecue burning next to two stuffed animals.”
• Related: “On the Challenges of Studying Suicide” (via Maria Popova/Brain Picker on Twitter)
• Fascinating post over on Life and Six Months about handling the preserved, tattooed skin of a long-dead person: “What appears here as ‘goose-flesh’—a skin sensation associated with both surface feelings of cold and visceral fear or horror —is frozen in the moment of death through the speedy preservation of the excised fragment. What I am actually seeing and feeling as I examine this skin is the presence of a very familiar living skin-sensation—except in this case it is caused by rigor mortis of the arrector pili muscles in the dermis. My own skin prickles at the thought. This specimen was likely removed in haste, soon after death and under rudimentary surgical conditions.”

Photo taken moments before the execution of prominent Mormon John Doyle Lee in 1877 for his role in the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. Lee is shown seated on his coffin. 

Find out more about the massacre in this article on the Smithsonian’s Past Imperfect blog.

On March 28, 1877, John Doyle Lee, wearing a coat and scarf, took a seat atop the coffin where his body would lie. A photographer was nearby. Lee asked that whatever photograph was made be copied for his last three wives. The photographer agreed. Lee posed. And then an hour before noon, he shook hands with the men around him, removed his coat and hat and faced the five men of the firing party.

“Let them shoot the balls through my heart!” Lee shouted. “Don’t let them mangle my body!”

On U.S. Marshal William Nelson’s command, shots rang out in the ravine where so many shots had rung out twenty years before, and Lee fell back onto his coffin, dead.

(Image source:Wikipedia.)

Meet Soapman. He’s an 18th-century Philadelphian dressed in knee-high stockings, and he lives at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. And he’s made of soap.

He was discovered accidentally in 1875 during digging for a construction project. From Discovery News:

Unlike other mummies which are kept dry to ensure preservation, this mummy was exposed to water, which seeped into the casket and turned the fats in his body to soap. […] Saponification, a chemical reaction used to create soap for millennia, literally means “soap making” in Latin. When water reacts with the fats and oils, a reaction called hydrolysis, the result is glycerol and soap.

This process is common when bodies have been exposed to water. The end result is called adipocere, or grave wax.