May 5, 2025
December 17, 2013
1793 was a tender year for the new United States: the Revolutionary War had come to a close, the Bill of Rights had recently been ratified, and plague of yellow fever had struck the nation’s largest city and newest capital, Philadelphia.
Read MoreDecember 10, 2013
Seeing the buzzing around Jane lying prostate in bed, I felt myself on the set of the Ars Moriendi, the small medieval manual featuring eleven woodcuts on how to die the Good Death. The scenes are more crowded than the main floor of Barney's at Christmas season, teeming with saints, devils and people.
Read MoreDecember 05, 2013
The victim of the first big mistake I ever made was a gentleman to whom I had never been properly introduced (and whose name I still do not know) but who was possessed of three singular qualities: he was alone in a room with me, he was without his trousers, and he was very, very dead.
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December 04, 2013
Does life end when the heart stops, the brain fizzles, or when those closest to us decide it’s over?
Read MoreNovember 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 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.