July 20, 2025
November 30, 2013
How one sets out to conquer death has everything to do with how one defines it. “We don’t get old, we rust from oxygen,” explains Dr. Harry B. Demopoulos, a researcher (and former actor) who studies ischemic injury, looking for methods to mitigate cellular damage caused by a restriction in blood supply. A Spaniard of the sixteenth century might put more stock in the Fountain of Youth, that mythic baptismal curative.
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November 22, 2013
By the time I began my emergency medicine rotation, I had come a long way from making that first tremulous incision into a cadaver during anatomy class. Back then, at the beginning of first year, I remember trying to conceal my apprehension as we removed an opaque plastic sheet from the supine body.
Read MoreNovember 20, 2013
Prior to and alongside mouth-to-mouth, a bevy of resuscitation methods had been foisted upon the apparent dead. Bodies were rolled over barrels or dragged by their feet, feathers were inserted into throats, tobacco smoke was blown into rectums, and victims were forced to swallow various concoctions of spirits, vinegar, and urine.
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November 19, 2013
An introduction to the Death issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
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November 17, 2013
The rationale of the memento mori tradition is that we’ll commit fewer sins, waste less time, if we remember our end. That we won’t be such jerks. “Depend upon it, sir,” says Samuel Johnson, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Read MoreNovember 15, 2013
Photographer Paul Koudounaris brings to life a group of long-forgotten Catholic relics: the so-called Catacomb Saints, discovered in the catacombs of sixteenth-century Rome. Believed to be the bones of martyrs, many of the relics were sent to Germany to combat the growing Reformation. There the bones were intricately decorated with jewels and presented as symbols of power for the Catholic Church.
Read MoreNovember 08, 2013
On the May 12, 1838, the eighty-four-year old Prince de Talleyrand vomited blood at his own dinner table. It happened in the Parisian palais on Rue St. Florentin where he passed his retirement in semi-regal splendor. He had been entertaining old friends, the Princesse de Lieven and the Duke de Noailles. The old man, ever courteous in the manner of an aristocrat brought up in the ancien régime, apologized profusely and retired to bed.
Read MoreOctober 31, 2013
When the slaves of New York died, usually of disease and overwork, they were buried in an unincorporated patch of land in a wooded ravine just north of Chambers Street, near the Collect Pond. The city’s fathers had declared the churchyards—the favored burial spots of the elites—off-limits to blacks both free and enslaved. Just as there was a hierarchy for the living in New York, there was a hierarchy for the dead.
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October 30, 2013
Each generation faces death in its own way, and while the skeleton’s hollow-eyed gaze and mocking perma-smile have remained constant across time, humans have pulled a range of faces in response, ranging from the reverent to the ridiculous.
Read More2023:
Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
c. 1850:
Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.
2023:
Writers on strike search for romance at the picket line.
c. 1945:
Young communists engage in party matchmaking.