Merry Christmas from Krampus and Morbid Anatomy

Merry Christmas from Krampus--St Nicolas' Eastern European, cloven hooved, birch-switch bearing sidekick--and all of us at Morbid Anatomy. The Museum is closed today, but will be open regular hours tomorrow, December 26.

Happy Birthday to Jesus and a Merry Christmas to All!

Wishing a Happy Birthday to Jesus and a Merry Christmas to all with this figure of Jesus seen in Aguascalientes, Mexico on our recent Death in Mexico: A Special Field Trip to Mexico for Day of the Dead.

You can see a full set of photos from this trip by clicking here.

A Very Merry Christmas Indeed: 18th Century Italian Pathological Nativity Scene Crèches!

Towards my sincere wish that each of you has a very merry Christmas today, please accept this virtual gift: two intriguing and lovely pathologically-detailed 18th century Italian nativity scene crèche figures from the collection of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University.

An excerpt from the article on Atlas Obscura:

Holiday Creche Figures With Goiters

...The lovely ladies seen above were made to be part of a classic nativity scene, welcoming the infant Christ into the world. They are shown suffering from what was once a relatively common malady: goiters. These enlarged thyroids caused painful swellings in the throat usually due to iodine deficiency in the diet, and were particularly prevalent in Alpine regions of Europe where the soil was naturally low in iodine.

These two dolls are known as Crèche (or Presepio) figures, and are found in Nativity scenes. The country women, garbed in handmade peasant dress, have unusual features that led to their inclusion in the Yale’s Medical Historical Library. Both have prominent goiters on their necks. Goiters are swelling of the thyroid gland.

Creche figures often depicted “realistic” features, and in the 18th century, peasant and country folk were thought to be a great addition, often in the background of the scene. Figures with goiters attending the birth of Baby Jesus is an entire level of realism never expected in a Nativity scene...

We often think of the beauty associated with the Nativity, but in reality, people in earlier centuries had a variety of ailments that manifested on the outside, and weren’t removed. Skin diseases, tumors, and goiters, which we don’t often see in people with the help of modern medicine, were not unusual.

--Melissa Grafe is the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History at Yale University.  

You can read the whole article--from which this is excerpted--on Atlas Obscura by clicking here. And thanks, Dylan Thuras, for sending this along!

And Merry Christmas, y'all!

Images of creche figures courtesy of the Yale University, used with permission.

Happy Holidays from Starewicz, Stop Motion Insects, and Morbid Anatomy

The Insects' Christmas (1913)
Rozhdestvo obitateley lesa (original title)
A Father Christmas ornament climbs down from a decorated tree, and goes to the forest. There he creates and decorates a Christmas tree for the forest creatures. He then invites all the insects, along with a friendly frog, to come and enjoy the gifts he has prepared, and to celebrate Christmas. Written by Snow Leopard

Found via my former intern Laetecia; Text via IMDB.

Happy Holidays From Morbid Anatomy and Friends

Happy Holidays, everyone, from me, Darwin/Santa, The Frightening Clapping Monkeys, and GF Newland, the genius maker of this card.

'The Night of the Hunter' New Deluxe Criterion Edition

News alert! Just in time for Christmas, Criterion--God bless them--has released a deluxe, 2-DVD edition of Charles Laughton's 1955 unparalleled masterwork--and Morbid Anatomy film favorite--The Night of the Hunter.

Director Charles Laughton memorably and accurately described The Night of the Hunter as "a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale," and that it is. Starring film-noir bad boy Robert Mitchum in a much imitated performance as an evil preacher with "love" and "hate" tattooed on his knuckles (see top image), a slightly depressing Shelley Winters, and a late-career star turn by silent film mega-star Lilian Gish (see bottom image), the films is by turns hallucinatory, menacing, and darkly comic, but always lyrically beautiful at the same time. It is truly its own thing entirely; I simply cannot recommend it highly enough.

The new Criterion edition supplements the film itself with an archival interview with the film's cinematographer Stanley Cortez, a 2 1/2-hour making-of documentary, and interviews with a variety of critics and scholars.

To read a really wonderful article about the history of this remarkable, influential, and idiosyncratic film, click here. Click here to purchase the Criterion Edition of Night of the Hunter from Amazon.com. To purchase same in Blu-ray, click here.

Thanks so much, Megan, for letting me know about this!!

Image credits: Image one, from the LA Times article "A Second Look: 'The Night of the Hunter'"; other images from The Horror Digest.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Morbid Anatomy and Our Mischievous Side Kick, Krampus

Morbid Anatomy (and our mischievous side kick, Krampus) would like to wish you all happy holidays and a fabulous new year.

To see many, many more images of Krampus, click here to visit the extensive collection (from which the above images were drawn) housed on the Monster Brains blog. Learn more about Krampus and his evil ways here.

Merry Christmas From Krampus and Morbid Anatomy!

When I lived in Budapest, I learned of the Eastern European tradition of Saint Nikolas' evil sidekick, Krampus. This is by far my favorite of Christmas traditions. So, from Morbid Anatomy and our evil sidekick Krampus, a non-denominational Merry Christmas!