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02 - The Punished Dilettante
45 Plays3 months ago
Jen tries her best to gross out Dave and Tracy with bizarre tales of the preservation of human body parts for “educational” (?) purposes. Please note that you might not want to be eating while you listen to this one.
CW: Suicide
Please check www.thewonderkamer.ca for sources and further reading.
https://www.thewonderkamer.ca/episodes/2anatomicalspecimens
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Transcript
Introduction to 'The Wonder Camera'
00:00:24
Speaker
everybody. Welcome to the Wonder Camera. This is your podcast where three dilettantes talk about things we find fascinating. My name is Jen Rempel. I'm here with... Tracy Anderson Powell.
00:00:37
Speaker
oh we Let's do it again and not speak exactly at the same time. Ready? Okay, you go first. Okay, no, no, no. ah All right. You go first. two, one.
00:00:48
Speaker
David Powell.
Theme: Gross and Ghoulish Topics
00:00:50
Speaker
That will set you up for a bit where we shout at the we shout our names at the same time. David Powell.
00:00:59
Speaker
And Tracy Anderson Powell. And I am here today to tell you about some interesting things, of course. um just oh thank God. i you don't want to be too boring. Now, I'm going to say right off the bat, this is a fascinating topic. um Are you guys eating right now?
00:01:17
Speaker
Because you probably don't want to be eating anything. Drinking is probably okay. Eating food, you might not want to be eating food at this moment. ah I'm impressed that we got to a gross out episode on the second recording because i was genuinely thinking, oh, wish I should have something disgusting in a future episode because good content. Well, it is. But i here we are.
The Evelyn Tables and Historical Context
00:01:41
Speaker
Here's the thing. Gross out, ghoulish stuff. That's kind of going to be my metier, as it were. Because it's a kind of freak I am. Okay, so we'll get going. and Does the phrase evil and tables mean anything to you at all?
00:01:55
Speaker
No. Like like evil endtable and tables? Like the name Evelyn. Oh, ely table like Evelyn Oh, Evelyn like... Okay, so Evelyn tables.
00:02:06
Speaker
Any meaning? What a name. No, I've never heard that word before. Take a look at this photograph. Sorry. Look at this photograph. If you can in the link. Now, do you see these? spend a few years in Alberta and it poisons you. know. Oh, that looks macabre. Sure is.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah, what is that? Oh, we'll get into it. That's some dead. That's some dead motherfucker. Yes, Dave's onto it. Okay, so what these are these tables were made in the 1600s in Padua and what is now Italy.
00:02:37
Speaker
So this place is going to come up again later on. These are called the Evelyn tables. And who they were. So unfortunately, it's not a cool name. It is the name not of a person. It's a cool name of these objects. So they're named after a man called John Evelyn, Evelyn, John Evelyn, who purchased them and brought them to England.
00:02:57
Speaker
So we'll get to what they are in a sec. ah interjecting he's john evelyn going forwards we're talking about ghoulish subjects we are going to put emphasis on evil as in the fruits of the devil good idea evelyn you know it never occurred to me this is why we need two other hosts right evelyn i mean i really irritatingly nicknamed any evelyn i knew evelyn and they all hated it well this guy's dead so he he doesn't have a choice now so Which means being dead and not having a choice, a theme of this episode. So... now
00:03:31
Speaker
The dead can't consent. Unfortunately. Oh, no. Yeah, that reminds me some evil politics, which we'll be getting to that, though, actually. Yes, we'll get there.
00:03:45
Speaker
Oh, yeah So these tables were purchased by John Evelyn.
John Evelyn's Contributions
00:03:50
Speaker
Now, this man was born in 1620, and he has been described by historians as sort of a 17th century virtuoso.
00:03:57
Speaker
Now, this guy was a gunpowder heir, which you could be 1600s. It's sort of the equivalent to the evil industrialist's child, right? But he spent his own life pursuing his various interests. So he was a dilettante, just like us, but with way more money and way more time. So he... but Yeah, he was we still have to work. That's right. A gentleman, of course, does not work, will never work, and is useless. ye And that's what makes them gentle. Exactly.
00:04:27
Speaker
To give you a sneak preview, my episode is going to be about a gentleman from the 16th century. so Sweet. All right. I like the scene we have going, tying together. All right. So Evelyn became an expert, though, in gardening. He had a particular interest in trees and medicinal plants.
00:04:43
Speaker
Again, worthy of an episode, perhaps. you know he wrote treatises on land conservation, who's one of the first commentators to to discuss the relatively new problem of industrial air pollution.
00:04:53
Speaker
This is 17th century air pollution, right? So early on this, he was one of the first members of the Royal Society. So it's major British scientific society that still exists to this day.
Evelyn's Medical Interests and European Travels
00:05:04
Speaker
He also was very famous for his diaries, which have been compared to those of his contemporary Samuel Pepys. You know, it's spelled P-P-Y-S. You know that guy, Samuel Pepys? yeah Famous diaries. Yes. Who everybody in their brain goes, Samuel Pepys. And then they hear peeps. And i'm like, well, that's yeah theyre like that's just nonsense.
00:05:24
Speaker
That's nonsense. Who made that up? It's clearly Samuel Pepys and his favorite diaries. Jimmy Pepys. Of which nobody knows their contents. It's one of the great mysteries of history. Indeed. The contents of his diaries. Because nobody reads them now.
00:05:38
Speaker
No, no, no. the the diaries can yeah The diaries are just like, you know, a grimoire. There was a great Twitter account that posted excerpts from his diaries on like the day. That was pretty fun. Where he stepped in a giant turd. I remember that one. Somebody posted that one.
00:05:57
Speaker
But another guy, but similar time. Have you heard of the company Crabtree and Evelyn? yes Yes. Named after him. He had nothing to do with it. Just a later... Oh....to make him sound fancy because of his interest in treats and words. Don't they...
00:06:12
Speaker
I just don't they make like, I don't know, frilly, nice smelling. They do. They do. Okay. Because I see that and I think of a logo and I'm not going to look it up because, um you know, this can be the one place where I don't look everything up instantly on my phone. Fair enough. You know, like soap or something with a nice logo that says, you know, Evelyn and Crabtree. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You're picturing Evelyn. That's right. nothing to do it Wonderful. Good. yeah But still. Nailed it. You did. Famous guy. His other interest, though, was medicine.
00:06:43
Speaker
So he was a keen collector of art and oddities. So these two interests would often intersect, right? His interest in weird things and in medicine. So like a lot of wealthy English guys of his day, he took a lot of trips to Europe to pursue this interest and to collect various objects for his own cabinet of curiosities, his very own wonder camera.
00:07:03
Speaker
So that's going to be a recurring theme. the wonder camera so Evelyn did Evelyn rather did not become a doctor apparently he saw ah some gore and could not handle it so oh I totally get that yeah he did yeah like healing people's fine until you see what's inside of them and my god there's nothing good in there oh no just nothing my no my one regret is that I will never see my own skull
00:07:37
Speaker
Isn't that weird thing? It's true. It's like, or I'll go to the doctor, I'll get go to the optometrist, and they'll be, like, scanning my retina. They're like look at this. It's like, whoa, I'm looking at the thing I'm seeing with. Whoa.
00:07:47
Speaker
But it's just seeing your own skull. I know. You know, if there's ah if there was a way. I guess x-rays as close you can get My life's goal is to see my own skull now. That's not a good goal.
00:07:59
Speaker
Because you know it's only going to happen accidentally. No. Well, who knows? Science is ever-changing. So who knows what wonders science can bring? Skull replacement surgeries. so Yes. Okay. On that note, fascinating things. the Surgery is very fascinating. And Evelyn found it to be so because he just liked to go to hospitals and see what was going on.
00:08:22
Speaker
So he traveled to the Netherlands in the 1640s, kind of just to see how they did things over there. So he did go to Leiden University. And I'm going to say shout out oh to a ah student, not to brag, but I did go to Leiden as well. He didn't take any courses though.
00:08:39
Speaker
So he enrolled in their school of medicine, but probably because.
Bizarre Medical Anecdotes
00:08:44
Speaker
Oh, I've been to lots of universities. I didn't take courses at yeah've been university. but i been so many universities Yes. University Edinburgh. Yeah. I was there. I saw it. yes right the Same credentials as this guy. So you're you're getting up there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm a certified onlooker. That's right. That's right. Yeah, same here. Well, and a while this time, in this case, I actually did go to Leiden, but it was and it was an arts degree, so didn't have to worry about blood and guts. For our listeners, Jen's the educated one. Oh, why, thank you. We're all educated in our ways.
00:09:16
Speaker
Yes. In our ways of having an education. Indeed. so he was pretty impressed with Leiden. They had a huge, like early anatomical theater, giant botanical garden, which is still there. you can visit that. I was just there a couple weeks ago. In fact, it's a beautiful place. Oh, wow. He watched. I want an anatomical garden. Yeah. Yeah, a physic garden in the anatomical theater.
00:09:40
Speaker
No, it's just like, you know, like so legs sprouting all over the place. Spleens. Grow yourself an ear. o Yeah, nervous system dangling from a tree. That's fascinating. And you guys are... A grow-your-own-ear thing for the kids. Yeah. Can you imagine? But you guys snuck a peek at my notes because... ah ah These gory images will have a place momentarily. Excellent. I'm ah excited that our... I don't know what I'm saying here. Go on, Jen. It's all good. It's going to the heart-shaped box video. You seen that?
00:10:14
Speaker
Pretty nasty. I have. Of course. I'm 45. Of course I've seen the heart-shaped box video. I am also 45 and have not seen it. We'll include that in the show notes, link to Nirvana's Heart Shaped Box video. Because actually that kind of does get the theme. So Evelyn is hanging out in Leiden. He's going to the hospital, seeing what they're doing. He's watching some dissections, you know, that kind of thing, you know, normal stuff, right? I do want to read this paragraph from historian C.D. O'Malley. This is a quote. Returned to Leiden, Evelyn matriculated in the university where, although he undertook no studies, he was much impressed by the medical school, its physics garden, and especially by the anatomical theater and museum.
00:10:55
Speaker
On a later occasion, when the Duke of York told him of a woman who had swallowed an ear of barley that eventually worked out of her side, somehow popped out of her side, I guess. Yeah, I
Origin and Purpose of Anatomical Specimens
00:11:05
Speaker
don't want to know. oh Evelyn was able to recall and describe... and no, no i want hold up. I want to marinate on that for a little bit. going to skip past this. She swallowed it like... An ear barley? I can walk down the street and find an ear of barley growing around the place. I live in a very agricultural area.
00:11:22
Speaker
And the notion that if I swallowed that... I'm not going to shit it out. It's just going to work its out way out through my side? I guess so Just popped out. What in the... oh Probably... i like It's probably in her clothes.
00:11:34
Speaker
It got stuck in her bra or something, you know? And you get popcorn in the your bra sometimes. Oh, I hate it when that happens. You know what? Barley bra is a common problem in the agricultural north of Alberta, I have to say. Probably, I'm sure it must be, you know? They're probably just like, it popped out of her side. I'm sure it was something bizarre or was fake. Like the whole woman who gave birth to rabbits thing, which we won't even get into now. Oh, yeah. Or if she ate like a straight up ear of barley, it might have just become lodged improperly in her stomach and then punctured and then the body worked it out. I mean, that's... I guess it's possible. I don't know anything about medicine, but I do know I can make up that possible outcome. That's what we'll go with because I mean have no other explanation.
00:12:16
Speaker
How is that much different from medicine in the 1600s? I'm not writing it down. And you're not saying it's true. You're saying it's possible, but.
00:12:27
Speaker
Oh, I'm saying it's true. it It absolutely happened. Okay. Yeah. We'll go with that. We'll go with that. So he's the Duke of York is telling him the story. So Evelyn was able to recall and describe a knife he had seen at Leiden 20 years earlier.
00:12:41
Speaker
and he noted in his diary at the time, he this knife was newly taken out of a drunken Dutchman's guts. by an incision in his side oh after the Sautish fellow had swallowed it. So it's like a Hieronymus Bosch. Some Dutch guy swallows a knife in his drunken stupor.
00:12:58
Speaker
He thought the knife would be able to cut itself out. Yeah, that should be a problem that takes care of itself. Yeah, the how can the barley, you know, self-extract but a knife can't? I'm starting to question my own, you know, true statements. Yeah. Maybe she accidentally swallowed a knife as well but thought it was barley. I don't know.
00:13:18
Speaker
Who knows? But eventually, Evelyn's travels... So that's bizarre thing. Quote's finished. We'll get back to Evelyn now. His travels took him to Padua, Italy. Of course, before it was Italy where he picked up those bad boys, those Evelyn tables. So what are they?
00:13:33
Speaker
The Evelyn tables. were made in the 1640s by a Pagin anatomist named Giovanni Leone d'Este. I'm trying to get these pronunciations right. I love that you you got the hand motion in there too. Yeah, ah because this is an audio medium. Nobody understands that Jen was doing the hand thing in order to get the pronunciation right, which is correct. have yeah they have to The only way to sound this in Italian is to bind their hands. You kind of do. yeah it's just how it is, right? Yeah. They speak with their hands, right? Trying to be respectful. So not much is known about d'este, as far as I can tell. So as you can probably guess, these are anatomical preparations, right? So those four tables that I showed you, They consist of various human tissues cut out of a human body, glued down to these wooden boards and then lacquered over.
00:14:23
Speaker
So pretty gross. But I don't know how you would do this even. So to quote Wikipedia, the first table is the spinal cord and nerves. It's a human body. The second shows the aorta and the arteries.
00:14:35
Speaker
The third shows the vagi, vagi, whatever that is, and sympathetic nerves and the veins of the lungs and liver. And the fourth shows the distribution of the veins. So it's spinal cord, nerves, veins in these four tables, somehow cut out of a human body, glued down.
00:14:51
Speaker
Like pretty gross, but pretty amazing. Yeah, that's spectacular. Extracting the nervous system. With knives, right? Because that's all you've got are like knives. And I didn't even know if tweezers were invented then.
00:15:07
Speaker
Nobody looked that up. And so mike that's insane. Yeah. Yeah. So bizarre. Yeah. Very fast. And they look like a, like a nightmare kind of, they look very frightening. They're very just for those who will put pictures in the, in the, in the show notes too, in the YouTube, but yeah, they look creepy. They're just these like sort of shiny golden Brown boards with,
00:15:31
Speaker
The outline of a person in veins and nerves, basically, for most of them. So they're quite this weird. I've seen diagrams of the nervous ah system or the vacuular vascular system or whatnot. And I guess this is how you do it in the olden times. That's right. That's how you learn. Because that's what they're made for. Now, these are the oldest surviving anatomical preparations in
Changing Attitudes Towards Dissection
00:15:52
Speaker
Europe.
00:15:52
Speaker
So very, very early, sixteen forty s Nothing before then has really survived. And these are now in the Hunterian Museum in London, England. This is a famous museum of anatomical specimens.
00:16:03
Speaker
So although I like to be an international you know lady of mystery, keep my we want to keep our locations anonymous, let's just say. I did see them in person recently. So I do have a photograph that I took myself.
00:16:15
Speaker
Not as good as the one from the British or from the Hunterian, but I saw these Evelyn tables in person, along with a lot of other gross, nasty things in jars. like Like, you know, those frogs. Oh, like the skin pants? oh no i did see the skin pants too but not there but yeah nasty stuff and um basically like a bunch of globs of things you know what they had there too was you those frogs where the babies come out of their back have you seen those they had one of those in a jar and i wanted to puke it was very disgusting Oh no that's just the the greatest trypophobia nightmare in nature. And like, think my gross out scale, like my scale for what is disturbing is kind of shot because I'm all over this kind of ghoulish stuff. But even then I was like,
00:17:01
Speaker
It's very gross. So, yes. So as you can tell, my subject today will be anatomical specimens and those specifically made from actual human body parts. So I'm going to have a, again, content warning here. It's going to get more gross, of course. I'll be talking about human anatomy and dissection, but I'm also going to touch on things like infant mortality, suicide, the abuse of the abuse rather of corpses.
00:17:26
Speaker
So do be aware and probably don't eat while you're listening to this. So thankfully, Dave and Tracy are not eating right now, as I've warned them. I have a lovely cup of coffee. Maybe don't take a sip when I'm going show you something right before I show you a picture. Okay. Noted. So what were these specimens for? You can probably guess they were intended to be educational. As Dave said, like that's kind of what you'd have to do. Somebody would would have to painstakingly take out the nerves and draw them or in this case, glue them down or something right to make them preserved for educational purposes. Okay. So the people who made and who still make anatomical specimens always claim, oh, these are purely educational.
00:18:07
Speaker
But I don't know. I kind of suspect these guys are freaks. Yeah, I was going to put it more delicately, but yeah. I kind of think there was something gross going on with some of these guys. De Este Evelyn tables, I don't know. But there's something weird going on with some of these folks, which we'll we'll talk about later.
00:18:25
Speaker
Just rank-oonery. Yeah. So and just for a little bit of history here, the study of human anatomy can, of course, be traced back basically to the earliest human history. I'm not going to get into too much detail about all of that. It's a huge topic because my topic is, strictly speaking, some preserved specimens. And I'm going to just focus on a few of them because this is a huge rabbit hole topic. I could do episodes on so many different things. So we'll just focus on a couple of these specimens for now.
00:18:51
Speaker
So historians of medicine have traced the human interest in anatomy, medicine and surgery back to the earliest civilization. So you have this in Mesopotamia and you know Egypt, those cradle of civilization places, right?
00:19:06
Speaker
They were dissecting human bodies, trying to figure out what would what was going on with people, right? Because... It's curiosity would lead you there, right? Because, uh, Hey, uh, Bill or the Mesopotamian equivalent to Bill just keeled over. Well, I guess let's find out what's inside of him and what didn't work anymore or what does work. And yeah, I mean, it's,
00:19:28
Speaker
I wouldn't be surprised if there was, again, ah so long as people had the the minds to be curious about that, whenever we hit that evolutionarily, we're going to start cutting each other open to see what makes each other tick. Yeah. And then eventually we find it's much easier to do it to a corpse. Yeah.
00:19:44
Speaker
ah Yeah. Much less cruel also to do it to a corpse. it's a human thing we're curious animals right we and like you say yeah like when something goes wrong gotta figure out apparently even crows do this i heard this i think from sarah marshall one of her podcasts if if a crow dies the other crows will like investigate and be like what the hell happened because yeah they have all funerals too or is that ravens probably both ah they're They're probably so similar. Crows are a little more social, but they're so similar. So yeah, so back then, you know, Egypt, Mesopotamia, i probably Sumeria, wherever, they're dissecting human bodies, most likely, right? Of course, the Greeks then, when we get to them, they are very interested in science and medicine. But I was kind of surprised to learn this. It is with them that the practice of human dissection actually became frowned upon. The Romans would later outright ban the practice, which again, i was kind of surprised by because we think of the Greeks and Romans as sort of the...
00:20:39
Speaker
founders of science and scientific method early on, but they were doing things in a more theoretical sense, right? So ah Han China as well, dissection was banned. It's believed that later on in some medieval Islamic societies, this was banned, although there's they're not really sure about that. So quite early on,
00:20:58
Speaker
you know, early on in the sense of like the modern era, the common era, right? Dissection is, began to be seen as interfering with religious ideas about the sanctity of the body.
00:21:08
Speaker
And so the general prohibition on human dissection would last about 1500 years. Generally, I'm speaking mostly about Europe here, because this is going my main area of topic, my main area of familiarity. So depending on what part of the world you were dissecting human bodies was just not allowed, basically. It was very disrespectful. That,
00:21:28
Speaker
so That makes perfect sense to me because you have your scienticians or philosophizers and medicinal nutjobs who want to see what makes a body tick. And then, you know, someone goes, that's my mom. Stop it immediately. Yes. What is wrong? Stop it. And so this. Yeah. Yeah.
00:21:50
Speaker
And so when you couple that with, ah you know, these societies where religion is ingrained into literally everything, these attempts to push in different directions and they come to cutting open your mom, you know, there's a reason why, you know, the grave robbing and all that kind of thing, which I'm sure is going to feature in this because anyone who wants to cut people open is going to start with graves. That just makes perfect sense to me. But the fact that it showed up in China as well possibly possibly in the Islamic empire is yeah. So you get this international urge to find out what's going on. And then the conservatives kind of the wrong word, but traditional resistance again, please don't cut open my mom or even that prisoner, not him either. It's weird. Knock it off.
00:22:38
Speaker
Well, it's actually quite a dilemma really. And I, you know, when you think about it in that sense too, it is, you're right, like quite problematic because you're thinking about these are human beings. these are people's loved ones. Right.
00:22:49
Speaker
But as you will see, it's not going to stop some people and it's going to get pretty interesting. So never has never will. Well, it's still a dilemma to this day, right? It's still an issue. People have to donate their bodies to science in general, right? Training. We're having more computer models these days. But again, dissection is part of learning to be a physician.
00:23:10
Speaker
but I intend to donate my body to art. because Yes. You know what? That's a good idea. you know, I'm going to donate. I want the world's most offensive ah performance artist to commit indignities upon my corpse in whatever way ah satisfies the requirements of that artistic piece. I think it's the only ethical thing. Honestly, that's a good idea. Have you seen Joel Peter Wittgen's photographs?
00:23:34
Speaker
Okay, that's a whole other episode. But if you know what i'm talking about, yes, he made bodies into art for sure. That's a whole other episode, I think, actually. It's a good one. But yeah, so even you've probably heard of Galen, the famous Roman physician. Even he who relied on animal dissection and treating injured gladiators for his observations.
00:23:55
Speaker
And the fascinating thing was Galen was the four humors guy who basically kind of, although he was innovative in many other ways in terms of like blood flow, how the veins work, all these things.
00:24:05
Speaker
He was the four humors guy, which held back medicine for like a thousand years because nobody was passionate. Right. And he wasn't even dissecting people. He was just looking at dead, you know, animal, he's dissecting animals and sometimes like vivisecting, which I don't want to talk about because it's,
00:24:21
Speaker
disturbing and horrible but they would do that too cutting open animals that were actually alive which is disgusting but they could do that but human dead corpse is no way you can treat a gladiator you know maybe if you find a corpse in the street take a look but yeah really prohibited to actually do this in a sort of scientific way so these prohibitions did begin to slacken in europe Sort of in the late medieval period. So I'm going to quote here historian Connor T.A. Brenna. I'm going quote him. He attributes this to both a continued evolution of attitudes regarding the body after death, which saw its preservation as decreasingly relevant to the afterlife.
00:24:58
Speaker
and to the emergence of the first universities in Europe. So, end quote there. two Essentially what's happening is, as people are saying, well, okay, we have these religious ideals, but who cares? the soul isn't being dissected. It's just a corpse. Who cares?
00:25:09
Speaker
And we need to, we have all these universities coming about, all these universities starting up in like the 1300s.
Anatomical Tools and Dioramas
00:25:17
Speaker
People need a way to study things scientifically, especially anatomy, right? we're looking for way out. when you have, and like a very Christian thing just theology, right? Mm-hmm.
00:25:28
Speaker
where And I can be completely talking out my ass here, but I'm not aware, for example, because there's tons of Roman writings, Roman theology, right? Where they're actually like constantly questioning and like me interpreting and having giant councils and fights the nature of their religion because christian Christianity is inherently an organized religion, While polytheism was only pseudo organized.
00:25:55
Speaker
And you have all these monks writing about the nature of God over and over and over again throughout like a thousand years. That thought's going to advance. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That makes perfect sense to me. It's good change. And I think, you know, you have, again, material conditions, right?
00:26:09
Speaker
Universities are emerging. People need to learn this stuff, right? If people are dying and, you know, we need we need medicine, this is a recognized thing, right? So back to my quote from Brenna. So this era fostered a renewed recognition of in the value of anatomy and therefore of anatomical dissection as a tool of scientific medicine. So in 1231, Common Era, holy Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II resolved that a single human cadaver could be dissected every five years for the education of surgeons. oh And I don't know if this is all of the Holy Roman Empire, probably.
00:26:43
Speaker
So one corpse every five years. That's all the information I have. I don't know whose body it was. i don't know where they're getting these corpses, probably criminals. Approximately what century was that? one The year 1231. 1231.
00:26:56
Speaker
Oh, okay. So it's its things are changing. And this is you going to continue loosening up these laws, especially in Europe. So we see autopsies becoming legalized for like forensic investigations. ah generally the bodies of condemned and executed individuals were sort of increasingly deemed acceptable to dissect, right? Because again, it's like, like you said, Dave, I don't want you cutting up my mom, right? Like this criminal, and like you said, na the criminals back then, they were no, but now it's like, well, I guess those guys committed, they probably stole a loaf of bread, and so, you know, cut them up.
00:27:30
Speaker
Yeah, Aethelred the asshole pig thief. Yeah, yeah yeah he's up. let's see ah yeah Let's see what a spleen does, buddy. Yeah, check it out. Won't bring my pig back, though. Yeah, well, yeah. Oh, wow.
00:27:43
Speaker
it's He's punished, acceptably punished for stealing a pig. Yeah, that's how it was. So, of course, European societies at this time had pretty strict limits on whose bodies and how many could be dissected sort of per year. So as you alluded to Dave earlier, of course, rather infamously, anatomists and surgeons kind of up until the 19th century And well, they even today, but it's changed, had a really hard time coming up with bodies for medical instruction and for study. And so they did become to rely in some places on grave robbers, right? And you have cases where there's outright murderers like Burke and Hare and in Scotland in the 1820s, literally killing people, bringing the corpses to Robert Knox, the physician. And he'd be like, oh, these look pretty fresh. But and so that was a huge scandal.
00:28:27
Speaker
Yeah, he was a sick freak too One of the corpses he got was so gorgeous He kept it preserved in whiskey For three whole months before he dissected it And I'm like, oh I don't want to know what he was doing in those three months. I think he... There's a meme kicking around about why mortuaries tend not to hire men.
00:28:50
Speaker
And it's exactly why you think. yeah Yeah. It's bad. another one i Remember, men are disgusting and what did you say earlier, Tracy? A corpse can't consent. That's the thing, yes right?
00:29:01
Speaker
Also, I just heard this really horrible rumor that when Marilyn Monroe died, her body went missing for six hours. On the way to the morgue. And supposedly... Oh my god, that poor woman went through everything. i don't know that's true. was trying find out because it's so horrible.
00:29:18
Speaker
i hope it's not. but Conspiracy theories about Marilyn Monroe would be a fun episode. Honestly? yeah Interesting woman. yeah So now, i even in my notes, it says to focus back on anatomical specimens. Again, this is a gross episode. It's a lot of fun, but yeah, it's kind of gross. due to the difficulty of procuring bodies for students and instructors to dissect, you do see it people begin to create types of anatomical teaching tools.
00:29:42
Speaker
in the 16th and 17th centuries, right? Because if bodies are scarce or rare, you need something to teach with if you don't have them. So i don't know if you've heard of anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius.
00:29:54
Speaker
He produced a very highly influential work on human anatomy, De Humanae Corpus Fabrica Libri Septum in Latin, as they were wont to use at the time, on the fabric of the human body in seven books. And these contained highly detailed engravings of dissected bodies. I'm going to send you a link here to take a look at them. Because a very influential book.
00:30:15
Speaker
And having done book studies at Leiden, we did talk about this. Books like this. This was the first time people were able to produce such detailed, like to mass produce such detailed works. Very...
00:30:31
Speaker
This is so cool. They're very beautiful. they're very It's very well done. Very artful. Also a little bit kind of creepy because he's posing these corpses often in various ways. So you'll see like a half-hanged skeleton or like a skeleton looking at a skull with a beautiful landscape in the background. they're pretty haunting, but they're very well done and really very detailed. So Vesalius was one of those people who produced very famous...
00:30:57
Speaker
printed work on anatomy, but you will see people creating other objects. For example, you see like carved dolls, like made of ivory or wood, and you can open them up and see the guts inside or like a pregnant woman, for example, you open it up and see a fetus inside.
00:31:13
Speaker
So you see a lot of wax models. So literally just somebody would look at a figure and make a wax model of it, particularly of anomalous conditions like ah venereal diseases and deformities. You see a lot of wax figures of these two. But you also begin to see the preservation of actual body parts as teaching tools. So like those Evelyn tables, right?
00:31:33
Speaker
Beyond that, though, people start doing things like preserving organs, fetuses, and other body parts in jars of chemicals, right? And they're working on means of preservation. It's a very famous image you can see. if you go to the Hunt Dairy Museum website, it's basically all this Evelyn tables and then just jars of gross things, basically. so There's one of those at the vet clinic. Oh, really? What is it? yeah. The vet clinic has a bunch of preserved stuff at the back wall. Yeah, that's pretty interesting, but cool.
00:32:04
Speaker
yeah So another innovation is injecting human tissues with wax and other chemicals to allow for dry preservation and display. So all kinds of means of preserving actual human body parts, not just drawings, wax figures, right? A lot of these objects. Oh, the trial and error on that must have been an insane. Oh, can imagine?
00:32:25
Speaker
Oh, God. Yeah. Well, that didn't work. Let's try the next thing. Yep. That's it. Chuck it in the fire. or throw it in the trash. Who knows? They seemed... It's just this big mound of bodies. Throw in the foot pile. Ugh. Yeah. Just chuck it out. Ugh.
00:32:45
Speaker
Just as a mountain of badly preserved dismembered feet that just slowly builds up. But imagine with all those strange chemicals. yeah Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Nasty. Well, yeah, the American Civil War, too. Just piles of, like, hacked off legs and feet and arms. Just...
00:32:59
Speaker
Yep. the pile. ah my My understanding of Civil War medicine is literally the only form of medicine they applied was amputations. And they applied it no matter no matter the problem. So if you, for example, have bloody stool, you're getting something amputated.
00:33:17
Speaker
No question. That's the only thing they have. Yeah. An asectomy, yes. Take off those cheeks. Asectomy. um I'm just cutting the ass right off. So there probably are preserved as cheeks somewhere in the world because many of these probably preserved items they still exist and they are preserved in museums and universities around the world, of course. So famous collections of anatomical specimens and displays include that Hunterian Museum in London, in London, England. There's a Musée du Poitras in Paris.
00:33:50
Speaker
Museum of Roelich in Amsterdam is cool one. And the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia is very famous. I've been to all of those except the Mütter, the Mütter. And i probably will never go there because it's in Philadelphia. And I will never go to America again, probably. So yes, the Musée du Poitras in Paris is interesting. It's temporarily closed now. But in 2009, I was in Paris and I want to visit because I'm a freak. And i had to pretend to speak French.
00:34:18
Speaker
Because the guided tour was in French only. So I was like... yeah Oh no, you had to speak Canadian cereal box French. Yeah, I was like, oh oui, yeah. Sucre.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Sans sucre. Sans sucre, yeah. Avec... Anyway, yeah I'd have turned to speak La pomme de terre.
00:34:41
Speaker
Yes, I know that one. Potatoes. ah so I did, you know, kind of awkwardly join this tour. we just walked through like a room of wax models, like a lot of diseased penises and vaginas, lot of faces with warts and horns growing out of them, jars of nasty things. Yeah, a lot of gross things in jars. And like the thing with these museums is they're gross at first, but, you know, when you see a few two-headed lambs in jars, like you kind of get used to it. Like the Hunterian that I was rees at recently is kind of gross. Like I did kind of feel sick.
00:35:14
Speaker
It could have been, I had a giant coffee right before I went in. Didn't, you know, my stomach was upset, but yeah. But nonetheless, the point is you're a spooky lady.
00:35:25
Speaker
And as a spooky lady, you were still queasy by the end of these tours. Yes, that's right. I could be getting weak in my old age too, honestly. I could just be like, okay, you know, I'm becoming more less jaded perhaps somehow. Partly it's also because when you see these displays, some of them begin to verge on the grotesque.
00:35:43
Speaker
I have never seen one of these, but you can find examples in libraries of books bound in human flesh. Again, that's a whole other episode. But again, what is the value to that, right? Like you would, for example, there'd be famous examples of like a a condemned criminal would write a memoir and somebody would publish the first edition one copy in that criminal's skin, right? And they are real. Like, you do see examples of things like that where, what is the purpose? Is that educative? Is that educational? Or was the person just a sick freak, right?
00:36:17
Speaker
I'm trying to think through the thought process there at the time because it's like, you know, we've got Bob the axe murderer and we've got his memoirs here. so what do we do with his memoirs? I got an idea.
00:36:31
Speaker
ah oh Yeah, to go cut off his skin and bind the book in Perfect. Yeah, and there's one case I read about recently, too. i was reading a Joyce Carol Oates novel about this gynecologist from the early days. And he, one of his patients had severe trichinosis.
00:36:49
Speaker
Like, her body was riddled with worms. Like, horrible. So she lost weight very quickly. oh And after she died, he cut her skin off and used it to bind a book. Without her consent.
00:37:00
Speaker
Or her family's consent, of course, right? So, that's gross. And what is the value there? The guy probably is a sick freak. Like, look, I'm interested in ghoulish things. But, like, see, I'm not Ed Gein.
00:37:14
Speaker
I'm the person who would, like, drive past Ed Gein's house and look at the windows, right? I, like yeah like, you know? Like, fascinating to me. Because it is. Like, what's the difference between... No, it's like watching sports, but it's not actually, like, playing in sports.
00:37:26
Speaker
a fan. You got a team to cheer for. I'm on Team Corpse, just for the record. There's some merch for us. there we go hey Team Corpse? Oh my god, I love that. Because again, it's it is. It's this whole idea of like consent and all these things. The idea that dead people can't give consent is a horrifying thing, but... It's been pretty popular, right? And again, these moral and religious ideas, it's supposed to be for moral purpose for some reason, right? So these ideas have always had a place in medical research and in sort of anatomical preservation and dissection and all these things.
00:38:05
Speaker
So moral and religious ideas have of course always had a place in medical research and in the sort of golden age of anatomical preservation, like the 1600s, this time we're talking about bodies again were used as moral or philosophical objects in addition to being simple educational tools. And we we of course talked about this before, like sometimes they're more about art and like what the anatomist is doing with them, right? And that's kind of what's interesting here is like, Preserving anatomical specimens was meant to be sort of a highly academic
Roisch's Preservation Techniques
00:38:36
Speaker
affair. But I want to look at people who now got, shall we say, a little baroque with it. I'm going to show you another image here. and I'll share that in chat with you guys.
00:38:49
Speaker
If you're listening to this not on YouTube, there will be pictures YouTube. look at some of these. What do you think of these objects? So that first image you see...
00:39:00
Speaker
Oh my God. It's a still death. That's a good way to put it Like rather, rather than a still life, right? Oh, that's a good way. what do What do you think, Tracy? What do you, what do you think when you see this ah first image here?
00:39:12
Speaker
The skeleton at the top kind of looks like ah it has a baby. Sure does. So what we're looking at is a diorama made by so cute. Right.
00:39:23
Speaker
So what we're seeing here for the viewer is basically a pile of rocks, which are actually gallstones or kidney stones taken from people and sort of stacked around it neatly to look like trees. Those are preserved veins and arteries from humans.
00:39:41
Speaker
We have a whole bunch of little baby skeletons, basically fetuses. One of them is lying sadly on the ground. There's little insect, preserved insect hanging off it. I didn't even him. The guy the top there with the baby skull that you notice, he's playing a little violin made of bones. So it's a very bizarre image. And if you scroll down, you'll see some more of these. So you will see...
00:40:03
Speaker
Some images. This is from the public domain review. We'll have a link in our chat or in our show notes as well, but you'll see preserved animals. like again, one those gross frogs, you see preserved birds and the armadillo, very, very elaborate jar toppers basically. So we have an animal preserved in liquid. Then on top is like a diorama of further preserved animal or human tissue.
00:40:29
Speaker
oh This is donating your body to art involuntarily, but nonetheless, this is art. That's right. so again, I was going to ask, do you think that's something you'd like? yeah Yeah, it's weirdly beautiful.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So to be clear, are these sketches of things that physically exist or are these just sketches in and of themselves? well that's the thing.
00:40:53
Speaker
I personally am not sure. Now, these were things that supposedly existed, right? But we'll talk about that a bit more because I have my doubts, but there's a bit of a history here too. So again, we've described what we're seeing. It's like a diorama. This was made by Frederick Roisch.
00:41:12
Speaker
So these are typical of what sort of the the dioramas he became famous for, among other things. So Luke Koymans in the Public Domain Review has another separate great article on Reusch with a lot more images, including ones I just showed you. Joanna Abendstein is a person who's in this field who also has a good article on this topic, which, again, we will link to in the sources. But if you're listening to this, you you want to look up Frederick Reusch.
00:41:39
Speaker
R-U-Y-S-C-H. Very fascinating. He was born in The Hague in 1638. So he's a little bit younger than John Evelyn. So he's a little bit later than him, 15 years younger. He was an apprentice to an apothecary. so it's an old-timey pharmacist at a young age.
00:41:56
Speaker
So Frederick Royce was born in The Hague in 1638. So pretty early on, he was apprenticed to an apothecary. It's like an old-timey pharmacist. making their potions at a pretty young age. He was a little bit younger than John Evelyn by about 15 years. So they are near contemporaries.
00:42:11
Speaker
Roesch also went on to study at Leiden University. Shout out. And unlike Evelyn, Roesch actually would go on to graduate with distinction. He went on to become the chief anatomist of the Amsterdam Surgeons Guild for nearly 60 years.
00:42:26
Speaker
So as a professional, his whole deal was medical preservation for the purposes studying and teaching and also maybe for fun. Because again, looking at those dioramas, it's probably having a good time. And honestly, it's... Everybody needs a hobby. That's right.
00:42:43
Speaker
And there's a particular one I want to show because it's kind of funny. ah but I'll show it to you later, but it's okay. We'll just cut this part out. To quote an article by scholars, Mark Kidd and Irvin Modlin, Roy should particular developed a virtuosity in the crucial technique of revealing the courses of blood and other vessels by the injection of various substances into the organs. This is how he preserved, right? Using a combination of wax, resin, talcum, oil of lavender, cinnabar, and colored pigments. He was able to produce exquisite, lifelike specimens that maintained their original appearance almost in perpetuity.
00:43:19
Speaker
After injection, the specimens were placed... smelled nice. Well, yeah, you know, oil of lavender, get some cinnamon in there, cinnabar, I think that's cinnamon, not sure what that is But yeah, after the injection, the specimens were placed into a container of liquor balsamicus or nantic brandy, whatever that is, and black pepper to prevent decomposition. So it does sound kind of tasty.
00:43:40
Speaker
These wonders were described by one as... I mean, I get the preservative qualities of brandy and that brandy is a result of winemaking and therefore there's going to be brandy made.
Cultural Context of Anatomical Art
00:43:51
Speaker
But then you're adding pepper. There's lavender. They're going to eat these people. It kind of seems like it. It's a little soup, right? Yeah. Yeah, the first time food looks a little scarce. Ooh, brandy criminals. you know what?
00:44:05
Speaker
They were eating mummies back then as medicine, right? The Victorians were grinding up mummies. so Genuine problem. Yes. The yeah the mummy eating craze. That's so insane. Another episode. So Royce's wonders, I'm quoting here again from those scholars, they were described by a contemporary. a He said, a contemporary of Royce said, his mummies were so many prolongations of life, whereas those of the ancient Egyptians were only deplorable continuations of death. So he's famous because...
00:44:35
Speaker
He preserves these bodies in such a way that they look alive for a long time. You know, you're mummifying things. Obviously, it's a dried up corpse, right? So he's he's he becomes very famous for this, right? Yeah.
00:44:47
Speaker
So essentially he would preserve organs and tissues with wax and other ingredients that he kind of kept secret. And he put them in jars filled with alcohol and pepper, right? This is how he did the majority of his preparations. So they are not these elaborate dioramas of skeletons and veins and all the stuff that you're seeing for the most part. He did mostly do like tinned specimens, I guess. Jarred fetuses and jarred hands and arms.
00:45:17
Speaker
The dioramas were just a treat to daddy. Yes, I think so. So they looked very lifelike. And if you go to, again, this is interesting to you. You go to the website of the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg.
00:45:29
Speaker
You can see some examples of these. And again, we'll talk about why they are there in a moment. But going to send you another link. I hope this link does work. If you do a search there, Frederick Roisch. I did it in Cyrillic, but I didn't realize there's an English option. So I was trying too hard. You can see a lot of these there.
00:45:46
Speaker
They look pretty boring at this point. It's just guts in jars. That's kind of what it looks like. So you can peruse those at your leisure. Again, it's a lot of stuff in jars. So human tissues, organs, a lot of baby arms for some reason. i don't know. You like to have a little frill with the baby arms sticking out of it. So they're kind of creepy.
00:46:05
Speaker
Right hand of a one-year-old child. One of them looks like ground beef. Most of them kind of right? Ground beef child. Hey, wouldn't put it past them. Tongue of small child.
00:46:19
Speaker
Go with the pepper and the brandy. And I found this one, and this is ah interesting to me because if you look at it closely, you can see a bit of a hint of some of what those dioramas might have looked like.
00:46:32
Speaker
So this, for the the listener, is a petis, it looks like, preserved in a jar. And on top of it is, again, a diorama with a little dried up seahorse. with some dried up veins maybe, various objects presumably of human or animal origin. so you can kind of get a sense of what the dioramas might have looked like because they don't exist anymore.
00:46:54
Speaker
They are no longer around, which we'll get to in a sec. Those are definitely veins. So you can see, like, he obviously knew what he was doing in in a way, right? Because they're still around. This 300 years later, almost 400 years later, right? But how did they end up in St. Petersburg?
00:47:11
Speaker
Fascinating question, which again is another episode, but keeping to the facts. Peter the Great. yeah Yeah, that's right. You did. So David Mazursky in the Journal of Biocommunication. i drew upon a lot of this. That article, I believe, is behind behind a paywall. But we can give you the citation information. You can email us for more details if you like later on. Because this article has a lot of photographs and interesting images.
00:47:37
Speaker
contact at the wonder camera.ca thanks tracy perfect yeah so in 1697 czar peter the great of russia basically put on a disguise and traveled to europe for 18 months which is hilarious and when you think about it like he's just like the czar of russia yeah i'll just up as a pauper just travel around his grand embassy was intended as a way for peter to kind of secretly learn more about european culture and politics and to hopefully build allies among Europe's leaders.
00:48:06
Speaker
In fact, he was the first czar to actually leave Russia for more than 100 years up to that point. So 100 years prior, Tsars had never left Russia. They're very insular.
00:48:16
Speaker
So he's like, OK, these new ideas are coming about. Let's go check it out. So it's kind of funny. He wears a disguise, travels around like wishbone or whatever. But people saw through his disguise pretty much. For the most part, they knew. I was about to say he shows up and like speaking of this aristocratic Russian accent with the strange posture. Yeah, he probably didn't he speak French?
00:48:40
Speaker
Oh, it almost certainly did. French was the language of the court. Yeah, yeah, but there we go. so ah But still, yes but you pretty recognizable. Nonetheless, i love the the notion of the czar badly dressing up as what he thinks a poor person looks like. Yes.
00:48:57
Speaker
Showing up and then asking about the local intellectual discovery so he could take it back. It was strangely isolated agrarian nation where he is this absolute ruler.
00:49:08
Speaker
In a world where most monarchs were not absolutists. Yeah, even then, he was still yeah compared to the rest of Europe, too. Yeah, it was Russia was, you know? Still sort of that agrarian phase it would be for quite a while. So that's a whole podcast episode in itself. like I think that'd be a really hilarious, like look into his grand embassy. But during this time he encountered Frederick Roish.
00:49:28
Speaker
So apparently, i don't know how this happened. Apparently I got to dig into that a bit more, but the main fact were apparently that he, Roish came upon one of his preserved baby corpses. He thought it was so cute.
00:49:42
Speaker
He gave it a kiss on the head and bought Roish's entire collection. Had them all shipped back to Sink and Hister. Obviously, you must have done a good job. That's so adorable. Smoochie, smoochie. can't. They're just wandering giving a smooch on a preserved fetus, and then just saying, I'll take it.
00:50:03
Speaker
Take what? I'll take it all. I want lots of these. Yep. More of that came from. That's good eating. I'm just kidding. I don't know.
00:50:14
Speaker
just the worst pony jars. If neither of you know what that is, don't look it up. I'm not going to explain that. I don't think I want to know. Okay. But you know me, I'm going to look it later because I'm a sicko. yeah Tracy will not, and she'll be happy for not looking it up. yeah I probably will be and be very sad, but then some breaks. Yes, yes, you will.
00:50:33
Speaker
So these objects are all the ones that are of that that survived, right, are all housed again in the Kunstkamera, the Wonder Camera of St. Petersburg. This was Peter the Great also had a Wonder Camera, as every fashionable man did at the time. Apparently, you had to have your cabinet of curiosity. So I'm going to buy 800 jars of body parts.
00:50:55
Speaker
Great. Just like in the back room. It's like, and here's the curio collection. And it's just like dismembered babies all over the place. That's all it is. Okay, I'm going to leave now. Yeah, so yeah backing out slowly. Don't date somebody with ah jars of fetuses in their house.
00:51:15
Speaker
yeah it's not really appropriate, right? That's a bad sign. Red flag, red flag. flag, yes. Red flag. red flag yeah So it was interesting. Again, if you go to that Kunstkamera website that I sent you to, the elaborate dioramas no longer exist, apparently. So personally, I wonder if they were real at all. i They probably were, I suspect.
00:51:37
Speaker
A few of them, anyways. Yeah, because you can see the smaller ones, like the the ones in jars preserved, the smaller ones, like you see with us with the toppers, the fancy toppers, those still exist, right? But of course, St. Petersburg, think about the history of Russia for the last 300 years. St. Petersburg is only a few hundred years old, right? It's been at the center of... There's a massive fire at the Kunstkamera.
00:51:55
Speaker
The Russian Revolution happened. There's been war. and then general neglect, right? 800, 900 specimens, right? so in general... I can see some Bolsheviks storming and then just going, what the actual fuck and smashing everything immediately. right. And burning it down. Like, honestly, like kill with fire. ah Yeah. Honestly, like it is. That's exactly it. I didn't bourgeois filth.
00:52:23
Speaker
Disgusting. Yes. Because really. yeah And especially if you're just, you know, maybe a Russian soldier or, you know, worker you might look at this and think what the fuck this is disgusting this is it goes against god perhaps right i don't know again oh yeah it's more religious but maybe the russian people anyway you can see why it'd be a very disturbing thing to come across so yeah you have anybody who doesn't like the guy whose house they just stormed into seeing the uh the dismembered baby room that he shows off to his guests yeah they're like uh i'm going to i'm going to verb everything yeah just verb it yeah because really that's a All the verbs. Yeah, it does seem like a very decadent, disgusting, right? And especially, he made 900 these. i believe Roy should have assistants, but that's a lot of time spent
00:53:12
Speaker
playing around with horses. Like that is weird, right? Like that's come on. Right. And you, you get how contextually it happens. And this guy becomes the specialist and into it and just keeps doing it all the time because he's better at it than anybody. And there is value in it.
00:53:28
Speaker
But eventually you also realize, Oh, this is also really weird. And it's even weirder that Peter, the great bought all of them. Like to me, and again, this cultural realism, we can talk about that a bit later in my next little part, but yeah, very gross. I sent you another link here. Joanna Abendstein has a really good article on Roche and there are a lot more images. He had like, you know, there's a little fetus is kind of holding...
00:53:54
Speaker
babies hanging. It's bizarre. It's like a fetal skeleton with fetuses dangling from strings in its hands. Like very, very bizarre. Like this is again, very Baroque, very bizarre things. You take a look at these. Yeah. And you see one of the images. And just to be clear, kind of think this is awesome at the same time as it being, you know, unsettling and little strange, but Also, I mean, the approach to death from people hundreds of years ago, if we talk about cultural relativism and the closeness to death and the immediacy of death and how like only ex children ever survived to adulthood, you know, and just how medicine worked back then.
00:54:36
Speaker
I get that it's going to be a little less disquieting to them than it is to us. Well, at the same time... It's just... It could be... What is the mentality? like And there's one image, if you scroll down to the very bottom, on the bottom right, it looks a bit like one of the dioramas. It's a little bit more... It's basically like a fetal skeleton funeral, if you look at this image. Oh my god! Yeah, so it's not as elaborate, but it's...
00:55:03
Speaker
very they're kind of honestly they kind of make me laugh too they're kind of funny and like it looks kind of funny they are like because they have giant eye holes and just like it just looks and they're a little sad and and some of them are like uh it's just they kind of funny but again weirdly baby skeletons are hilarious to me yeah because the heads are huge and again is i feel kind bad for laughing But they're kind of funny. Again, these are... of all the things I can get upset about in my life, the indignities to the corpses of fetuses hundreds of years ago pretty low list. is...
00:55:38
Speaker
pretty low on the list this is Just wild. I don't have the words for it. That's right. And again, like, ah am I so going back to sort of actually you kind of touched on what was talk about right now actually is, again, there is cultural context we're missing. Like you say, death and illness were far more present in people's lives, even as late as 100 years ago. Like we've only had a medicine that actually works for like 100 Right? Like yeah up until the it was really guesswork, bloodletting, all kinds of fucked up shit. Like, oh, again, trying to throw, kind of throwing anything at the wall, right?
00:56:14
Speaker
What will actually work? yeah And so people were dying left and right, right? Infant mortality was very high. People lost pregnancies all the time. You probably had a ton of fetus skeletons to choose from. it' So... oh To be clear, ah just to give you a little sneak preview of my next episode,
00:56:33
Speaker
When ah it was believed that ah Queen Mary the First, Bloody Mary, was with child, they immediately made preparations yeah for her death. That's right. Because the chances of her dying in childbirth were so high. often think that if I was born and lived before birth control, I would just be a nun.
00:56:52
Speaker
Just because, yes like, i would, not by choice. have given that thought, too. Because what else would you do? It's terrifying. And I also, again, a whole other episode. When I was in Toronto, I i bought a book from 1905. It's some case histories and diseases of women.
00:57:08
Speaker
And it's terrifying. Oh, dear.
00:57:18
Speaker
we are so lucky like again say you about the industrial revolution i appreciate medical science like that is the main thing to me that makes it worthwhile and but in many ways is just the medical science Because again, people would die in left and right. And also again, in the golden era, you know you think of the the Dutch art of this period, the golden era, or golden age, Dutch golden age, you see a lot of still lives, right? So these are still deaths.
00:57:43
Speaker
Very clever, Dave. You sculpt paintings of like food and drink with a skull, right? So reminding you you're going to die, right? Which is, again, kind of weird because you'd be seeing dead people all over the place. You'd think you'd know, but got to get it in your art too.
00:57:59
Speaker
The idea of doing that as art is still... I love that stuff. Oh, me too.
The Punished Suicide and Ethical Concerns
00:58:05
Speaker
I think they would make fantastic tarot cards. yeah. Oh, my God. There's a skeleton. there you go.
00:58:10
Speaker
Totally good. I bet there's enough images of those to get tarot cards together. That's pretty cool. So yeah, certainly public domain by now. Oh, yeah, yeah. And like, with again, those engravings, public public domain review, because the engravings were made for a book that Royce produced. And again, the dioramas were probably real, but it's hard to say because the very elaborate ones don't exist anymore. So I do kind of icado wonder like if there was some, but he, you know, you can see that the smaller ones he made,
00:58:39
Speaker
probably were but to me it's a bit of a question but yeah so you'd think his sort of sculptures therefore might have been seen as memento mori like 3d renderings of that theme and would be appreciated that way i'd say but again i like the idea ah sorry uh just to interject and agree with you i think the notion that he created the sketches first and then the dioramas is extremely oh yeah that makes sense too you need something to to start with as well right Right. And so some of them might've been too ambitious for him to put together and never worked out. Or again, I'm sure a lot were destroyed too, but the notion that we have sketches and not dioramas while some of the dioramas exist to this day likely means a mix of a bunch of things, but I'm dead certain some of those sketches never actually were Yeah.
00:59:27
Speaker
Cause I look at them and they they are so elaborate and so delicate and I don't know. Yeah. They'd be yeah very challenging. And because Yeah, they only exist in those sketches and engravings. You do have to wonder, right?
00:59:40
Speaker
The ones that exist are much simpler. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah, very, very simple. And the elaborate ones, we don't have any evidence ever existed, even though they are the coolest ones, like the Mountain of Gallstones with the Fiddle Baby on it. Yes.
00:59:54
Speaker
Yeah, you have to wonder. That looks almost too elaborate. That'd be very, very difficult to do. And you also wonder, though, again, we kind of touched on about the survivors, right? Like, again, have mixed feelings about these objects like you because they're gross and in a way fucked up, but also...
01:00:14
Speaker
kind of fucking metal. let Like, you know, like they look kind of cool. Oh, so cool. They're pretty badass. This stuff is so cool. Like, they're amazing. Like, that is pretty amazing that somebody could do that, right? like it's those things where they're horrible, it's kind of cool it exists. And there are, again, moral quandaries. Like, again, what I think this is sort of similar to is you think of death photography in the 19th century.
01:00:35
Speaker
became very Became very popular, Victorian sort of funeral photography you'd pose a cadaver to look alive sometimes, or you would just take a picture of a dead body in a coffin. And this might seem morbid to us, like, oh, why would you want that? But really, if you're living in a time where death is far more prevalent and more of a part of everyday life, you might see it differently. So like a mortuary photograph, that could be the only picture that somebody ever has of like a baby that died, right?
01:01:04
Speaker
So, yeah ah yeah you know, it seems creepy and morbid to us at the time. But then and again, it comes back to also sort of different ways people handle corpses. Right. So some people will even to this day will will have a corpse in their house for a few days, at part of a wake.
01:01:19
Speaker
Which I think in north of in the North American context, we we probably wouldn't do that. And we kind of keep it more hidden. But we in a society where death is more prevalent, you might be fine with, oh, yeah, he took my, unfortunately passed away. He took my dead child's skeleton and made it into something worthwhile. Maybe, right?
01:01:37
Speaker
yeah so And also, i'm i'm not particularly troubled with the ethics of something like this that happened a long time ago, according to its context, according to what people needed. Even if some people went really weird and far with it, that's inevitable when you're doing something like this that is so odd, ah because I'm certain it was still considered a little odd at the time. But if somebody was doing it today,
01:02:05
Speaker
without anyone's consent. That's where it becomes an ethical question. But in the 17th century, I do not give a shit. It's just cool. Yeah, fair enough. Now, here's now, this is so fascinating because we're gonna get to the last. Let's see how far we could stretch my cultural relativism on this. The last thing i want to talk about. Okay, this is an object that I do find very fascinating and I find it very horrible. And I think it might be evil.
01:02:32
Speaker
And not evil in like a religious sense, but like evil in a like this maybe shouldn't exist. Now, this is an object that was apparently considered a work of great beauty and moral value in the eighteen sixty s So I'm going to send you again another picture. you can take a look at that. and I will say kudos to the photographer because. oh sweet Christ. Yes. Yes.
01:02:57
Speaker
If you zoom you can really see the detail. This is... Do either of you want to describe this instead of me? Just to get your impressions? I'll let Dave do that. oh i was about to pitch to Tracy. um Okay. What I see is ah a red-haired woman's body. She is gray-skinned. Her eyes are bloodshot. She looks...
01:03:23
Speaker
Youngish. Yeah, no, she looks young. And she is covered in snakes. These are smaller snakes. They are biting into her eyes. And in fact, the snakes also have gory ends to them. So there's a tail wrapped around her neck and the tail just falls apart into viscera.
01:03:42
Speaker
And it looks like the snake is entering and erupting from her eye while another one is biting her eye. And there are trails of gore all over the place. And she is in a lovely dress. I appreciate that. Yes. Very good description, Dave. Yes. So yeah again, if you're listening, go look at this We'll have a link in the chat. or And I keep saying chat. We'll have a link in the source. Show notes. Show notes. Show notes. Show notes. Show notes.
01:04:07
Speaker
notes So this photograph is by Carlo Vanini, and it's a great picture. i Kudos, right? that's like he made a very, very creepy photograph. And this is from an author named Ivan Chenzi, his blog of Death and the Maiden, which is appropriate. So these photographs, I think, were also published in a book he wrote, but I don't have that book. I'm going off of his blog post.
01:04:28
Speaker
So again, this would seem to me to perhaps say have a limited medical value. This, uh, this is called, and here's the thing too. The name is even worse. It's called the punished suicide.
01:04:44
Speaker
oh that Oh, fuck. Yeah, that adds a bit of a cast to it, doesn't it? So I think you can probably a guess what's going on here with this thing, right? So the most thorough thorough article on this object, this topic that I could find is by Fabio Zampieri, Alberto Zanatta, Maurizio Ripa Bonatti.
01:05:06
Speaker
The article is in Italian, however, so I used my limited skills in some Google Translate to get the gist of it. I believe Cenzi based his blog on this article.
01:05:17
Speaker
The authors call this object un grotesco preparato anatomico di Ludovico Brunetti, which you can guess, grotesco preparato anatomico. It's a grotesque anatomical preparation by Ludovico Brunetti. So...
01:05:34
Speaker
ah that is ah That is accurate. That is exactly what that is It is, yeah. And so you can find their article on ResearchGate. It's for free there. You can download it. If you're interested, will have a link in the show notes. Caitlin Dowdy also did an episode, a YouTube video on this object, which I saw about eight years ago, which I also... It's where I learned about it originally. and So she's a good video on that too, and you can find that link or do a search for it. So...
01:06:03
Speaker
What happened here was one day in 1863, 18-year-old seamstress threw herself into a river and drowned. So what all the sources say is that she did this out of amorous delusion. But who knows? She was lovesick. She was probably raped and impregnated and was ashamed and killed herself. That's probably what happened. Like, she's a young woman in Italy in 1863.
01:06:25
Speaker
Like, she probably had a shitty-ass life. I'm sorry. You know? so The authorities and everybody is going to say, oh, she was just struck with being, ah you know, the unbearable horror of being a woman and threw herself into the water because women be like that. yeah Rather than she was subjected to horrible things and could not bear to live anymore. Yeah, it's almost certainly true. Yes, that's right. So unfortunately, her unhappiness would continue. She happened to throw herself into the river in Padua.
01:06:56
Speaker
Again, we remember remember the Evelyn tables, right? Padua is home to one of Europe's oldest universities and for a long time was the center of anatomical study and research. So again, the Evelyn tables were made there a couple hundred years before. Ludovico Brunetti was a chair of anatomical pathology at the University of Padua at the time, and he requested the young woman's body be brought to him.
01:07:19
Speaker
So obviously very creepy, gross, icky things going on there. So Burnetti, he was born in 1813. So a little bit later, obviously, than the people were talking about before. a 19th century guy. he was interested in preserving animal and human tissues. So he developed his special tanninization technique. This is drying specimen, in this case, drying the skin and injecting it with tannic acid. So basically preserving it, sort of a a leather-like thing.
01:07:46
Speaker
Which is why she is gray. Yeah. So, yeah. This young woman apparently provided him with the perfect specimen for his experiments. So he did notice. So what happened was the reason you have the kind of snakes attacking her is her skin was actually lacerated by the hooks that were used to drag her body out of the river.
01:08:06
Speaker
So. no Oh. get They dragged her by the face. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's like out of her eye. Yes. it's like, oh, I can incorporate these into my little art project. No problem.
01:08:19
Speaker
So he desecrated her corpse and I guess the corpse of a couple snakes as well. So here's what he did. now I'm quoting Ivan Chenzi. First, he made a plaster cast of her face and her upper busts of her chest. This is what you can see in the picture and in the specimen itself. It's just sort of upper chest up.
01:08:40
Speaker
Right, right, right. it is It is literally just a bust. I'm also reminded of that old Margaret Atwood poem, You Fit Into Me Like a Hook Into an Eye, a Fish Hook Into an Open Eye. Yeah, that's a good one.
01:08:53
Speaker
o i remember that poem. It is great. Damn. My mom used to tell me that poem. Does he help you fall asleep? you fall asleep i love you I love you, Dave, like a fish hook into an eye.
01:09:05
Speaker
Thanks, Mommy. Yeah. um Your mom's awesome. ah My beloved mother. I mean mother. ah She's a great lady.
01:09:15
Speaker
I do know her too. We'll get her on one episode. Yes. She's an expert in so many things. Revolution in Lesotho? yeah All right.
Brunetti's Controversial Work
01:09:24
Speaker
so So unfortunately, this poor woman, Brunetti took her skin. He peeled away all of her skin from her head and her neck, being especially careful to preserve her golden, beautiful hair. She's a lot, a lot of red hair.
01:09:37
Speaker
He then proceeded to treat the skin. He scoured it with sulfuric ether and fixed it with his own tannic acid formula. Secret formula. These guys always got a secret formula. and So once the skin was saved from petrifraction, he put it back over the plaster cast to reproduce her features.
01:09:51
Speaker
And then he added glass eyes and I guess plaster ears to the creation. And then to hide the lacerations, he put the wooden branches to either side of her chest. He entwined these with taninized snakes.
01:10:05
Speaker
So he desecrated their corpses too. Poor snake families. Very sad about their their brethren. so and then he carefully... That's all right. The snakes committed suicide too. That's right. That's what they get. Snakes in hell.
01:10:17
Speaker
So... much you um We sit together. He mounting the reptiles as if they were devouring the girl's face. of course, he sees then back to the quote here. He poured some red candle wax to serve as blood spurts. And there it was a perfect allegory of the punishment reserved in hell to those who committed the mortal sin of suicide. So end quote.
01:10:40
Speaker
There you have it. So what do you think? Do you think that's fair? This is one of those things where like, it looks pretty cool. But it's also pretty horrible. so I'm curious about what your reactions are to this.
01:10:54
Speaker
History is gross and unkind. ah More importantly, men are gross and unkind. ah Yeah. Yeah, honestly. Because here's the thing. The story kind of continues a little bit. So yeah if that was...
01:11:09
Speaker
your child's body might feel a bit disturbed by this i mean if that was if somebody did that to one of my family members or one of my friends and showed me it i would go insane i would write at the bare minimum a very strongly worded letter that's pretty tough and then probably turn into an axe murderer yeah because i'd probably be okay with it oh yeah but you know what cool yeah Yeah. And what we can do, just hear me out. And what we can do after I hit him with an ax a few times is that we can use his secret tannic formula to preserve his corpse with an ax sticking out the side of it that can then serve as a lesson to the peril of those who want to tell misogyny. That's right. That's a good idea. You know, he yeah yeah he would deserve it. It's only fair.
01:12:01
Speaker
What's good for the goose, as they say? I think is fair and reasonable. And what's he going to do about it? He's dead. I'm not. You lose. win. Up yours, Brunetti. So he did. He's dead guy.
01:12:16
Speaker
Up yours, Brunetti, dead man. But yeah, so if somebody showed that to my family, if did that to my family member, bar I would like go insane immediately. But this guy showed the girl's parents what he did with her body.
01:12:29
Speaker
And they were very pleased, apparently. So he says, Brunetti claims he showed this to the girl's parents and they were very pleased and all her friends loved it because they could immediately tell who she was. They immediately recognized her and thought it was great.
01:12:46
Speaker
Now, you have to wonder. This leads me to believe that assuming this is true, and it very well may be, historical relat relativism or cultural relativism is a sham.
01:13:02
Speaker
I am a chauvinist for my own belief system, and every everyone else throughout human history across the world is wrong. so That's a joke. You're supposed to laugh at it. There's a lag. There's a lag.
01:13:15
Speaker
i was like I was wondering where you were going with that. I kind of don't disagree.
01:13:21
Speaker
Well, and again, there are our sphere of empathy, right? Here's the thing. When they are doing this with fetuses ah hundreds and hundreds of years ago, who were like, it's very different from an adult or barely an adult, a you know, an 18 year old where you want to tell a mean story about women, which is something that we're kind of fighting about today.
01:13:48
Speaker
And that's why it matters in a way that, and again, the any pro-lifers listening to this might have very different opinions about the fetuses. That's right. In which case I also say you're wrong and should feel bad about being wrong. But nonetheless, you get why there's a different reaction to this because it's a closer story to us.
01:14:08
Speaker
but's how empty Yeah, so apparently the family was quite pleased. Ivan Chenzi in his blog does discuss the difference between modern reactions to this object versus those of Brunetti's contemporaries. bruce Chenzi is like, was everybody insane?
01:14:20
Speaker
Because he notes people in Brunetti's day did react very positively to this object. And Brunetti went on to win the grand prize at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867 for this item and for some of his other his other creations. yeah So he won a prize. This was displayed publicly at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. Like, people saw that he was awarded a prize, i think, in Arts and Professions. So it was seen as, like, ah an amazing thing. And honestly... Oh, my... She's just at the head of a parade on a pole, Living Dead Girl by Rob Zombie's playing in the background. Like...
01:14:54
Speaker
kind of cool but like that's the thing it's kind of a challenge because to me again like i kind of think and again it's like the the misogyny you're putting out earlier dave like i almost don't disagree about the relativism thing because i feel like if your morality in this case christian catholic morality is so warped that you're like yeah if you kill yourself this should happen to you This woman committed suicide and we took her corpse and made snakes eating her face forever. Yeah, seems fair.
01:15:25
Speaker
Like to me, that's why this was seen as a beautiful object because it's telling, as you say, a misogynist morality tale, which to me makes those people sick, evil freaks.
01:15:37
Speaker
This is a young woman for a reason and not, let's say, an older man, because there's always been a lot of suicides. And the fact that it's a younger woman is by no means an accident. Yes. I'm confident about that. and And again, like the cultural relativism does have limits because when we start talking about concepts that are relevant and important in this time, you can talk like transatlantic slave trade. It's like low hanging fruit to talk about, but that's a bad thing. And its legacy heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily colors everything we understand about modern society. And so therefore, the beliefs of those at the time are not worth you know saying, oh, well, it was they were just a product of the time because so were abolitionists. That's right. And we'll cheer the abolitionists, right?
01:16:29
Speaker
Exactly. So fuck. So or in short, fuck you, Thomas Jefferson. Honestly, like, that's the thing. like to give cover to the past and say, well, they didn't know any better or that was a style at the time. No, they did. But they did know better. And in this case, too, again, like my point kind of here is not so much even just the corpse desecration. Like this woman, she's dead. Doesn't matter in a way. Right. like in a way, I personally don't believe in souls. I think probably if you'd asked her if she would like this to happen to her, she probably would' have said no.
01:17:02
Speaker
So it's not great. And again, the thing with like the the thing that's happening, say with like the the books about inhuman skin, there's a lot of controversy around that because libraries like Harvard own them. And the question is now, do we get rid of them or do we keep them? So objects like this, again, it's fascinating. And again, it's I feel so many minds about this because it is interesting that it exists and it's a fascinating thing.
01:17:25
Speaker
But when you look at it as an object that was produced by the specific religious and cultural context, it's pretty horrible because their morality is saying their morality is pushing them to say, no, this is a good thing. And this is what she would deserve. And this is a good moral lesson, not considering like the circumstances of what would have pushed a woman back then to suicide. Right.
01:17:46
Speaker
So again, very fascinating. And if I was a smarter person, i probably have more to say about the intersections of art and medicine and morality, but I'm just kind kind of going on in my innate sense of like, this is pretty fucked up Even i'm considering back then. I'm only so smart and I can certainly make up stuff to talk about it forever. yeah And I bet as we continue this podcast, the conversation is going to come up more than once. For sure. So that yeah was, oh, sorry, Tracy, did you have a comment?
01:18:15
Speaker
Oh, no. Okay, so that was the Punished Suicide and the end of my episode. Apparently, this is still on display at the University of Padua. Never been there. um i would probably go, actually, if I was in Padua. So, again, maybe would say... see it. Oh, I totally would see it. Yeah. yeah Because it's fascinating.
01:18:35
Speaker
And it's rua you can be respectful. Well, and also to like punctuate this kind of ah moral discussion, i don't think the I don't think this should be destroyed because it's fascinating. It's historically interesting. It raises a lot of very good moral questions with which are worth discussion. It's different from, say, a statue to a Confederate general Or Johnny McDonnell or someone because the statues are created in a situation where this is a great person and you must celebrate
Preservation of Historical Art
01:19:07
Speaker
them. And they are positioned as a moral lesson and a reinforcement of that culture and the values you're supposed to have.
01:19:16
Speaker
And you don't build a statue of a horrible person. Right. And you know, they don't have a statue. Well, not knowingly anyways, not knowingly, not knowingly, but there's not like no one put a statue of Picton in Vancouver after I was discovered what he was doing. Uh,
01:19:31
Speaker
So that's why statues are the kinds of things that, you know, and if they're a wonderful or really important statue, take it down, put it in a museum and then contextualize it. right But yeah, I would agree. I don't think it should be destroyed either because it is fascinating. And I think it probably should be on display because it does, again, show you this is the attitude and morality of the time. And it is like kind of an incredible object. Like you can see like the fact that that's it's 150 old plus And looks like it still looks very real. And like mean her skin is gray, but it looks very interesting and looks very vivid, i would say. Yeah. yeah
01:20:10
Speaker
So to wrap up, I had thought about discussing, you know, Gunther von Hagen's Who Does Body Worlds. Like, that guy's a freak. Do you know about the Body Worlds exhibits? Like that guy? I'm pretty sure. Oh. So basically, this guy plastinates corpses, skins them, and puts them in various poses.
01:20:31
Speaker
It was about 20 years ago, I went to see the exhibit in Vancouver. He's, oh, he's probably actually an episode. I should talked about him then. I thought you'd be more familiar. But he's a creepy fedora wearing pervert, probably, who essentially plasticizes bodies, skins them, puts them in various poses.
01:20:49
Speaker
takes an exhibit around the world, controversy all over. He's from Germany and originally. He probably gets his body's nefarious means. Apparently, a couple of the corpses he got from China had bullet holes in their heads.
01:21:02
Speaker
So, also sicko. But... but Yes. So again, this is still going on to this day. Oh my god. So there's a fedora-wearing pervert who is nabbing bodies through questionable means and then displaying them as art and everyone's mad about it. Yeah. And I gotta look at this up because apparently he wanted to do an exhibit where he's posing the corpses in sexual positions.
01:21:28
Speaker
Which normally they're like jumping over a hurdle. Like I almost fainted actually. and I saw it in Vancouver in 2005. I walk in, the skinned corpse jumping over a hurdle. And I was like, that's a human. Like it's like, I'm a ghoul, but I'm also like a coward. So it was very scary to see. There is a permanent body worlds in Amsterdam, which I haven't been to yet because I'm scared. And also i would want to get high and go, I know you've seen skinned bodies before, but have you seen skinned bodies on Wii? No. And just to put my moral flag out there, I heartily endorse this and I think it's awesome.
01:22:06
Speaker
Body world. i mean i'm going to take And I'm going to take a ludicrously strong stance on this, even if I end up winding up a hypocrite. Because, for example, I probably would not want a loved one to show up in this yeah unless they were interested in it.
01:22:25
Speaker
As in, I would love to my corpse to be used in such a way. When I say donate my body to art, that's what I'm talking about. I want a weird pervert to put together a display of like whatever nonsense they want, because that will fulfill me as a person. That's right.
01:22:42
Speaker
Honestly. And it's kind of cool. Like, that's the thing. i have such a mixed feelings because it is kind of cool. And like, this guy is a creep, I think. And honestly, like, The thing with Von Hagen, though, is he did say, I want it to be plastinated too, and my body to be posed in a museum to greet the people coming in. So at least... Like a Walmart greeter. Yes, yes. Yeah, so I'm like, okay, at least he's not a hypocrite, right? So my again, my stance this is kind of complicated. I think these objects are ultimately pretty cool and interesting, very morally questionable, but they exist.
01:23:17
Speaker
What I feel about them doesn't matter. They're out there. They exist. They're part of our now wonder camera that I'm sharing with the two of you. And that's all I got for today. What are your guys' concluding thoughts on these weird objects and people who made them?
01:23:34
Speaker
I'm really fascinated with them. They are... They're spooky. They're beautiful. They're a little bit strange. It's, you know, all the things that I look for.
01:23:46
Speaker
Dave? Oh, you think they're awesome. We know. Yeah. I've been shouting this is awesome the entire time. And again, the ethical questions that get raised about all of this are to an extent almost secondary, with the exception of that poor woman who who committed suicide, where again, that one feels a little close to home.
01:24:11
Speaker
And I think that's why it's unsettling, even though I do think that this is a legitimate piece of art and should be preserved because there's never going to be anything like that. Same with the like books bound in human flesh. Just why why destroy them? They're already there.
01:24:26
Speaker
like It's not like there's ah there's a machine that we have to stop of binding books. yes this This existed and you're never going you probably never going to see this again unless something really weird happens. So just like let it be a historical curio. I
Books Bound in Human Skin
01:24:41
Speaker
agree. And with it with the books too, I think that could be a future episode because ah they're becoming particularly controversial now because I believe Harvard is going to destroy some of their human-bound, human flesh-bound books.
01:24:54
Speaker
So it's who just gone mad. No, I'm just kidding. That one, it's a tricky one because it is. It's a challenge because they are, i agree, like they already exist. Nobody's being killed to make these again. And again, yeah it's horrifying. like The idea of a corpse can't consent is a gross thought.
01:25:11
Speaker
But... It's also true. Yeah. So, like, even yeah myself, I'm like, but once I'm dead, I don't care. Like, literally, chuck me the landfill. I do not give a shit. If you want to use me for art, I mean, but again, it depends what art, I guess. I want kind of a say. Like, I don't want Gunther von Hagen to pose me in some disgusting... pornograph you know what i mean like there's a different like or the you know or if somehow you're used as in some as ah some sort of fascist rallying cry however that would be I'd be opposed to that but I again I also won't have an opinion at that point thank you so much Jen that was amazing I'm glad you liked it yes thank you was a lot of fun that was great oh thank you it's a lot of fun to research and again my episodes might verge on the ghoulish sometimes that's just how I roll
01:25:58
Speaker
So got deal
Future Directions and Farewell
01:25:59
Speaker
with it. That's totally fine, Tracy. yeah I'm ah going to be going after my little bit of dabbling in history to the modern and extremely online weird stuff I'm aware of. So we're all going to go into our own strange directions. Awesome. Although I think Tracy and I will be taking ah tours back into Canadian history quite a bit. That's great. yeah That's what i need to learn more about. I'm a shitty Canadian, unfortunately, so...
01:26:22
Speaker
i Most Canadians don't know our history very well. That's right. and there is a lot to explore there. And also in the world of podcasts of this style, very little said about that. Because frankly, I've learned more a history from podcasts than I have a book from books at this point. Mm-hmm.
01:26:42
Speaker
good podcasts that learned their history from books. And so I want to sort of continue that tradition a little bit. And so that's of interest to me, but also the weird, extremely online stuff. So thank you for listening to Wonder Camera.
01:26:55
Speaker
Any last words? Bye, listeners. Team Corpse! Team Corpse! Team Corpse! Thank you for listening to the Wonder Camera. Find us under the Wonder Camera on Blue Sky, YouTube, and Instagram.
01:27:10
Speaker
can