Today’s Noticeable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Matthew Lovat was a mentally unstable eighteenth-century Italian shoemaker. His mental condition first showed itself when he castrated himself as a young man. The ridicule that this aroused in his native village of Casale forced him to move to Venice. A year later he tried to crucify himself in the street but was stopped when he attempted to nail his left foot to a wooden cross. He returned to Casale and began work making ;a second cross, which he attached to a rope suspended from the ceiling of his third-floor room.
With the cross laid flat on the floor, Lovat stripped off save for a handkerchief girding his loins. He donned a crown of thorns. Slipping his feet into a specially made bracket, he proceeded to hammer a nail through his feet into the wood of the cross. He tied his body securely to the shaft of the cross to prevent him slipping off and imitated Christ’s spear wound by cutting himself with a knife. Next, using his free hands, he edged the cross towards the window ledge, until it overbalanced and fell vertically out into the street. Thus suspended, Lovat used his left hand to nail his right into the cross; predictably he found it impossible to nail his left, despite the fact that he had previously pierced the palm with a nail. Equally predictably, his actions did not go unnoticed by passers-by, who rushed to his rescue.
Lovat’s third attempt at suicide was successful but more orthodox. He starved himself to death in a lunatic asylum.
Culled from: Death: A History of Man’s Obsessions and Fears
Mütter Museum Specimen Du Jour!
Untitled from the Mütter Series ©2000 Candace diCarlo
Foetus, approximately twelve-weeks, cleared and stained with alizarin, preserved in glycerin.
Culled from: Mütter Museum