Today’s Misogynistic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Most of the purging of witches in fifteenth and sixteenth century France was performed by the Inquisition, and it was not until the 1580s that civil judges began to engage in mass persecution. Between 1581 and 1591, Nicholas Rémy, the attorney-general of Lorraine, personally condemned 900 witches; many were burned at Rouen in Normandy between 1589 and 1645; and in Burgundy some 600 were executed on the orders of Henri Boguet, the chief judge of St. Claude. In the Basque country of Labourde, the judge Pierre de Lancre, on the orders of the king, is said to have burned a similar number of witches in four months during 1609.
De Lancre claimed that all 30,000 inhabitants of the region had been infected by devils driven out of Japan and the East Indies by Christian missionaries. He tortured many to confess, and relied heavily upon the testimony of young children. According to his account, when the last witch was burned at the stake, a swarm of toads was seen escaping from her head. [A likely story… – DeSpair]
An illustration from Pierre de Lancre’s “On the Inconstancy of Witches” (1612)
Culled from: The History of Torture
Mütter Museum Specimen Du Jour!
Peruvian Trephined Skulls
Plaster casts of Peruvian Indian skulls acquired by the Mütter Museum in 1894 showing various forms of primitive trephination procedures. From the Muniz Collection of nineteen trephined skulls brought to the United States for the World’s Congress of Anthropology, held in connection with the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and returned to Peru.
Culled from: Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia