Today’s Furiously Insane Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Situated on a low, barren, sandy hill surrounded by a 140-acre wasteland of brush, bogs and boulders, the State Lunatic Hospital at Taunton, Massachusetts (as it was originally called) was opened in 1854. The central building – three stories high and surmounted by a seventy-foot dome – was large enough to accommodate 250 patients. In the early years of the institution, these inmates provided a convenient supply of labor. Under the direction of Dr. George C. S. Choate, the first superintendent, they were made to clear the brush, drain the swamps, and drag away the boulders, which were then used to build an imposing wall around the entire property.
As originally constructed, the hospital contained forty-two so-called “strong rooms,” designed to hold the most unmanageable inmates – “violent and filthy patients,” as they were described in the First Annual Trustees Report. Built of stone, brick, and iron, these cells featured all the amenities of a medieval dungeon. The walls were sixteen inches thick. Small iron-barred slits served as windows. The iron doors were barely wide enough to squeeze through and were secured with massive locks. In the wall beside each door was a small aperture, just big enough to permit a bowl of gruel to be passed into the cell. Since the intended inmates were raving madmen (and women) who refused to wear clothes and wallowed in their own filth, the “strong rooms” had stone floors that sloped towards the front of the cell and terminated in a gutter, “for the convenience of washing them out” (as the Trustees Report put it).
So ghastly were these tomblike cells that hospital administrators were reluctant to use them, even for the confinement of the “furiously insane.” Within a few years of their construction, the strong rooms were demolished and other, less inhumane quarters built in their place.
Culled from: Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer by Harold Schechter
Ghastly!
Luc Sante’s Evidence is a compelling collection of crime scene photographs taken by the New York City Police Department between 1914 and 1918. The images are always intriguing, often mysterious, sometimes artistic, occasionally shocking, and reliably graphic. The appendix contains a detailed explanation of all known facts regarding each image (include applicable newspaper clippings) and much reasonable speculation on those images where the facts are lost to history. I thought I’d start sharing images from this book occasionally, along with the text explanation.
Here’s the first image:
Luc says: “This body is almost certainly in a vacant lot, or perhaps an untended yard: concrete verges toward vegetation, garbage is abundant, and there is a wooden stepladder in view, which may have been brought there by the police. The deceased may have been felled from behind by a blunt instrument. He is bleeding from the mouth, but there is no other sign of violence on his person. The larger amount of blood is at some distance from the body, toward the top of his frame. He has evidently not been robbed; he retains his watch and chain. What might at first resemble an official document lying next to him is probably an open magazine. The rather alarming look of the tripod legs is, of course, due to distortion by the wide-angle lens, probably around 25 mm. The legs at upper left are those of the photographer or another detective. The victim is middle-aged and somewhat prosperous, but his left hand reveals him to have once been a manual laborer.”
Morbid Must-Have!
A new book is about to be released by the Burns Archive! Can I get an Aztec Death Whistle in celebration?
Stiffs, Skulls & Skeletons: Medical Photography and Symbolism
“This intriguing and comprehensive exploration of the skeleton and the dead body includes more than 400 rare photographs. Stanley B. Burns, MD, has studied, collected and written on medical photography for over four decades focusing on unexplored areas. His books have placed him in the forefront of medical photographic history scholarship. This work reveals the nineteenth-century fascination with the dead body and body parts. The classic visual iconography of postmortem, dissection, and bone photography is presented and expanded to include early autopsy images and X-ray studies. No prior visual work has presented the once very popular hobby of collecting skulls and also shown their use in racial and psychological profiling research. This sumptuously illustrated book with previously unpublished photographs is an extraordinary work of medical, historical and cultural research. It is a timeless visual essay that will surely become a standard resource for collectors, curators, artists, and scholars.”
I’m adding it to my ‘Wish List’ right now!