How to Kill an Animal Humanely: Guest Post by Michael Sappol, National Library of Medicine

Below is a guest post by our good friend Michael Sappol, author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies, curator of Dream Anatomy, and historian at The National Library of Medicine. It was originally posted on their wonderful Circulating Now blog.

Is empathy innate? Are we all born with the ability to identify with the emotions of others, to feel someone else’s pain? Today’s media is chock full of stories about experiments in neuroscience and child psychology that seem to show that the emergence and growth of the ability to empathize is a natural part of human psychological development, present even in toddlers.

Yet human beings periodically commit terrible acts of cruelty and violence, and are often indifferent to suffering. What if the development of empathy is a precious and fragile cultural accomplishment, something that has developed in fits and starts over time, in certain historical moments, in certain places, among certain people? Maybe most people have the ability to empathize, but what if empathy is a set of practices and beliefs that have to be learned and cultivated in order for individuals to exercise it? Those practices and beliefs would, of necessity, only fully develop in a society that has come to place a high value on empathy, that formally and informally rewards empathic behavior and punishes cruelty and indifference, a society that devotes resources to teaching, rehearsing and developing methods of empathy.

How to Kill Animals Humanely is a relic of the history of empathy. English-speaking people originally used the terms “human” and “humane” interchangeably, merely to distinguish human beings from other “brute” animal species. Sometime in the early 18th century, “humane” began to have a special use: to denote a compassionate, caring attitude toward the suffering of other humans and animals, a profound sensitivity that was both a moral obligation and a psychological condition. The word “humane” increasingly came to be used in opposition to “inhumane,” a term that was applied to acts of cruelty to other living beings, and to the people who took pleasure in inflicting suffering or who were just callously indifferent. In the 19th century, “humane” societies were founded to “prevent cruelty,” first to animals (and later to children), first in Great Britain and then in the United States.

This pamphlet, a publication of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA), is both a polemic against “needless cruelty” and a handy guide for those who are obliged to slaughter animals for food, medical research, or—in the case of injured or ailing animals—for purposes of euthanasia. “If you must kill them, do it without cruelty. Every animal has a right to justice and protection at the hands of the superior animal—man….” (This was very unlike contemporary antivivisectionism and vegetarianism, and later People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which absolutely opposed the slaughter of animals, and which criticized the very notion of human moral superiority.)

The author, Dr. Daniel Denison Slade, was a socially prominent surgeon and veterinarian, founder of the Boston Veterinary Institute, professor of applied zoology at Harvard, director of the MSPCA, and a man of many other interests. Being a veterinarian of longstanding practice, Dr. Slade was an expert on animal slaughter. In his little pamphlet he considers how “the Jews,” Germans, French and Dutch do their killing, but in the end makes his own recommendations, supplemented by helpful illustrations. Ways to kill animals “in the most humane manner possible,” must vary according to the varying anatomical structure of different species: horses, cows, dogs, pigs, cats, poultry, Dr. Slade tells us. Even fish should be killed humanely. For most mammals, the creature should receive powerful blows to the head with a mallet— precisely where depends on the species and individual beast—stunning the animal into unconsciousness, and then finishing it off with more blows or a bullet or a blast from a shotgun. Slade also considers other techniques to lessen the suffering, even chloroform. But he warns against “pithing” a method “commonly in vogue,” in which the “spinal cord is severed or punctured between the first and second bones of the neck.” Such an approach, he worries, is “undoubtedly attended by more suffering than other methods.”

Although humane techniques of slaughter may require some practice to get right and a bit more work, Slade argues, they can also improve “the wholesomeness of meat for food, and the market value of the animal slaughtered; there being no question as to the effects of torture, cruelty and fear upon the secretions, and if upon the secretions, necessarily upon the flesh.” He finishes the pamphlet with a long listing of the mission and accomplishments of the MSPCA (including the provision to Boston police stations of “hammers and hoods for killing horses mercifully”), followed by the Society’s “thirty-nine articles of faith” and a fee schedule for membership.

Read other How To… features from the NLM Collections here.
Michael Sappol is a historian in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine.

Image List

1. How to Kill Animals Humanely, 1879. By D. D. Slade, M. D. 
2. A longitudinal section of the skull of a horse. Original caption: Situation of the brain. Fig. 1 
3. A drawing of a horse's head indicating where the humane stunning blow should fall. Original Caption The horse may be destroyed by blows upon the head, by the bullet, or by chloroform.1. by blows.– Having blindfolded the horse, the operator, armed with a heavy axe or hammer, should stand upon the side and to the front of the anumal, directing his blow to a point in the middle of a line drawn across the forehead from the dentere of the pit above the eye. See Fig. 2. One vigorous and well-directed blow will fell the animal, but the blow should be repeated to make destruction sure.
4. A longitudinal section of the skull of a cow.
5. A drawing of a cow's head indicating where the humane stunning blow should fall.  Page 9…vessels, or by plunging a long and sharp-pointed knife into the heart and large blood-vessels at a point corresponding to the upper potion of the brisket, and just above the breast-bone.
   Failure to fell the animal at the first blow cannot be attributed to any difference in the anatomical structure of the part, but rather to the fact that the blow was ill-directed, almost invariably too low, that it was not sufficiently powerful, or that both of these faults were combined.
6. "Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith". D. D. (Daniel Denison) Slade (1823–1896), How to Kill Animals Humanely (Boston: Issued by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, [1879?]). 15 pp., illustrated. 4” x 6½”.
7. "Rates of Membership". D. D. (Daniel Denison) Slade (1823–1896), How to Kill Animals Humanely (Boston: Issued by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, [1879?]). 15 pp., illustrated. 4” x 6½”.

Physiological Ads for the Modern Self: Guest Post by Michael Sappol

Below is a guest post on anatomical modernist Fritz Kahn and "Physiological Ads for the Modern Self" by our good friend Michael Sappol, author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies, curator of Dream Anatomy, and historian at the National Library of Medicine. It was originally posted on their wonderful Circulating Now blog.

Fritz Kahn (1888–1968), a German-Jewish physician-author, was the first great exponent of the conceptual medical illustration—illustrations that go beyond the representation of human anatomy to visually explain processes that occur within the human body. His published works, aimed at a mass readership, contain thousands of imaginative images, produced by a cadre of talented commercial artists. In Kahn’s Das Leben des Menschen (5 vols., 1922–31), many of the illustrations copy the look of contem­porary advertisement, with display type, sub­headings, physically attractive models, etc. But they are not intended to sell a product: instead the human body, its structure and functions, are what’s advertised. 

In Der Mensch Gesund und Krank (2 vols., 1939) the figures are mainly given a standard format that no longer permits headline-style display type within the frame of the illustration. This greater design consistency made for a more streamlined modern look. But Kahn never fully embraced consistency in presentation: he and his artists still eclectically borrowed from a variety of advertising design and illustration methods and subjects.That approach was not invented by Kahn and his artists. Anti-tuberculosis, pure food, sani­tary cleanliness and anti-venereal dis­ease cam­paigns before, during and after World War I, were already using tech­niques of adver­tis­ing, with varying degrees of artfulness, in Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States and other coun­tries. But in Kahn’s books lessons on anatomy, physiology, microbiology and path­ology take center-stage without any directly instrumental purpose. 

Take for example “The Sensory Organs of the Head,” which uses the encircled face of a beautiful woman to present a lesson on cellular physiology and the senses. The setting is the home (then accounted as “woman’s sphere”). Haloed by a circular band around her head, the female figure resembles a Holly­wood starlet. Within the spotlight, her head is tilted back and lips parted slightly. The pose is ambivalent: Is she overwhelmed, frightened, on the edge of sexual arousal? None of these are particularly relevant to the lesson at hand, but all of them are relevant to the aims of the author and his artist, which is to get the reader to pay attention to the image. The illustration mimics con­tem­porary movie posters, glamor magazines and cosmetics ad­ver­tise­­ments. The glamor girl is bom­bard­ed with the prolife­rating sensual experi­ences of modern­ity. The spe­­cialized sensory re­ceptor cells seem to be shoot­ing out along radiating dashed line-tracks launched from the tech­nolo­gies, com­mod­i­ties and experiences of everyday life. Heat is repre­sen­t­ed by a steam radia­tor; sound by a phono­graph; light an electric lamp; cold a draft coming through an open win­dow. The cells, like futuristic aliens or sur­realist­ic­al­ly distorted spermatozoa, seem to be attacking, pushing to penetrate the protective circle to gain access to the female sub­ject and achieve “the reception of stimuli arising at a distance.”
Everything about “The Sensory Organs of the Head” tells the reader that we are in the modern world, but the aesthetic of the image comes entirely out of commercial advertising, and not modern art. 

In other illustrations, especially in the 1930s, Kahn’s artists were influenced by modern art and modernist poster and magazine advertisement. There was a two-way traffic in images: phar­ma­­ceutical manufac­turers were mak­ing illustr­ated ads that took up some of the same themes that Kahn fea­tured—images showing stylized interior pathways of the respiratory and digestive systems. A few years after the publication of Kahn’s 1926 color poster “Der Mensch als Industrie­pa­l­ast” (a collaboration with uncredited artist Fritz Schüler), Chem­ische Fabrik Promonta GmbH hired Kahn and Schüler to produce similar illustrations for advertisements for their pharmaceutical products. 

The convergence of advertising illustration and fine art—the dynamic exchange of stylistic moves and aesthetic principles—is now so familiar to us, so pervasive, as to almost be invisible. We expect such things. But in the 1920s and ‘30s, this was something new and powerful, a way for Kahn, his artists, his readers—and commercial advertisers—to be modern and more modern still. Kahn’s images signify a condition of life and an aspiration: if humanity lived in the modern world of cars, machines, mass media, and proliferating advertisements, then such things were also inside of us. We are modern at the physiological core of embodied existence. 

Michael Sappol is a historian in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine. This blogpost is adapted from Michael Sappol’s new book, How to Get Modern with Scientific Illustration(forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press, 2016)

Image List

1. An illustration that adopts the form of an advertisement.
   “The digestive zones in this area are: saliva–alkaline; gastric juices–acidic; pancreatic secretions–alkaline; colonic fermentation–acidic.”
   Das Leben des Menschen Vol. 3, 1926
2. “The sensory organs of the head, chiefly for reception of stimuli arising at a distance.”
   Der Mensch Gesund und Krank Vol. 1, 1939
3. In its composition, shaded textures and treatment of the figure (the lips!), an illustration that looks very much like a contemporary poster graphic.
   “Four ways to deliver drugs” [oral, intravenous, intramuscular, suppository].
   Der Mensch Gesund und Krank Vol. 1, 1939

The Call of Abandoned Souls: Guest Post and New Book by Ivan Cenzi of Bizzarro Bazar

Following is a guest post by Ivan Cenzi of the Bizzarro Bazar blog, who has just published a new, heavily illustrated book on the astounding Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples, which some readers might remember from this recent Morbid Anatomy post. You can find out more about the book--and order a copy of your own--here.You can also visit in the Morbid Anatomy Library where you will find a copy on our Death and Culture shelf!

THE CALL OF ABANDONED SOULS
The strange, unorthodox cult which developed in the Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples
by Ivan Cenzi, Bizzarro Bazar

The Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples is not just exceptional in its location (the remains of 40.000 human beings are stacked inside an ancient tuff quarry), but mainly because in this evocative underground cathedral a popular cult has developed over the ages: it's the cult of abandoned souls (anime pezzentelle). Anonymous souls, poor and deprived of the prayers and comfort of their loved ones, souls in need of the compassion of the living to alleviate their suffering. 

There is an undoubted elective affinity between the suffering souls in Purgatory and they who struggle and suffer in this world. There has never been any doubt in the minds of the Neapolitans about the truth of suffering on Earth, where hope is weak, work is inevitable fatigue, and the hell of Vesuvius ready to explode at any moment makes every breath uncertain. Naples is in some senses a purgatorial city in itself. An afterlife where suffering continues is inevitably a familiar concept. 

So the Neapolitans found in this poverty – the dead leave behind all material goods, and are left forgotten in suffering, while the living are always in need of assistance and help – the trait d'union between this world and the next. The skulls piled in the great cavern became a bridge between the tribulations of both sides, a symbolic representation of all the “nameless souls” waiting for redemption. 

According to tradition, a person would choose a skull to adopt, dedicate his prayers to and light candles for. Sometimes on the other hand it was the departed who “called” and chose his supporter, appearing in dreams to show himself: he would then tell the story of his life, frequently a tragic tale, and ask for offerings and prayers on his behalf. Once the identity of the soul in question had been revealed, the skull was cleaned and polished, placed on a piece of cloth with a rosary around it, and surrounded with flowers and candles. All communication occurred through dreams: in this way the soul of the deceased could keep his champion informed on his state of “relief”, the effectiveness of the offerings, and about the advancement of any requests for favor. This last frequently concerned for example an ailing child, a daughter who could not find a husband, or a husband away at war, in other cases it became a request for lottery numbers – in the eternal hope that luck and fate would alleviate financial problems. 

Whenever piety shown by the faithful was rewarded by an answer to their prayers, the decorations would become more ornate, The piece of cloth was replaced with an embroidered cushion with lace, and the skull would be put in a glass display case or, where this couldn't be afforded, in a tin box. The more “generous” skulls ended up being adopted as protective spirits by the whole community; if on the other hand no prayers were answered, the cranium would be returned to the stack and another chosen, and the whole process started over again. 

This worship of anonymous remains was clearly not contemplated by the Church, which only allows veneration of recognized, Vatican-approved relics of saints. Even the votive displays, when observed more carefully, look like a proletarian version of the sacred reliquaries kept in the Cathedral or in numerous other Neapolitan churches: the fideistic practice instituted de facto a range of unorthodox “saints”, not authorized by the Church and whose relics became object of the worship of common people. 

These original popular “saints” are the real Superstars in the cemetery – skulls so generous in their favours that they have, over time, become real icons of the cemetery, taking on the role of folklore characters around which various legends have sprung up. There's Donna Concetta, the “sweating head”, a revered skull that has the quality of attracting more humidity than any of the others. When little drops of water appear on its shiny forehead, the skull is ready to fulfill any requests. There is the skull of Pascale, who helps you win the lottery; 'o nennillo who brings happiness to the family; and the most famous of all, “the Captain”, around which several legends revolve, and who makes sure respectful girls find a good husband. 

It might seem surprising that such a practice was tolerated, however marginalized, for so long by the Catholic Church until the cult was definitively ostracised in 1969. Today, you can still see some old woman lighting up a candle before a specific skull, but the cult has almost entirely died out. And, as it so often happens in Italy despite our great cultural heritage, the Fontanelle cemetery is now sadly left to crumble. If you travel to Italy and find yourself in Naples, you might want to plan a visit before it's gone for good. Its enchanted underground location and sober arrangement of bones (not at all macabre, as in some other baroque italian charnel houses) make for a peaceful and meaningful break from traffic and confusion, as you enter a place where the barrier between the living and the dead was once trespassed.

Ivan Cenzi and Carlo Vannini's“De Profundis, second volume in the Bizzarro Bazar Collection, is dedicated to the Fontanelle Cemetery, and is available on Libri.it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ivan Cenzi is an explorer of the uncanny and collector of curiosities. Since 2009 he has been curator of Bizzarro Bazar, a blog dedicated to everything that is strange, macabre and wonderful.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Carlo Vannini is the photographer of all “cultural” objects: artworks, archaeological finds, restoration works, architectural structures, city views, but also ordinary handcrafted artefacts permeated by a strong historical feeling. Website www.carlovannini.it

Corpse Theatre in the Sacred Spaces of Italy: Guest Post by Elizabeth Harper, All The Saints You Should Know Blog

Elizabeth Harper of the fabulous All the Saints You Should Know blog has some astounding details to add to the material covered in our recent post on Sacred Italian Waxworks or The Last Judgement with Real Corpses in 18th and 19th Century Italy. She kindly agreed to write the following guest post which expands on the idea in surprising ways.

All image credits listed below. Please click on images to see larger, more detailed version!

Corpse Theatre, by Elizabeth Harper

There’s a building that’s hard to overlook on via Giulia in Rome. It’s the one with laughing skulls over the door. 

On a marble plaque at eye level, a winged skeleton holds a spent hourglass over a fresh cadaver. The plaque reads “Alms to the poor dead, which they get in the countryside.”

  “They” is La Confraternita dell'Orazione e Morte, or the Confraternity of Prayer and Death. They were a group of Catholic laymen who buried Rome’s indigent dead and this building was their oratory.

Burying the dead is a particularly important Catholic ritual because burial is linked to the concept of purgatory. Purgatory is a place where heaven-bound souls undergo a final purification before entering heaven, but in Catholic imagery it can easily be mistaken for hell. Fire surrounds writhing nude bodies. This fire is supposed to cleanse the souls just like the grave eventually cleanses bones of rotting flesh. Appropriate, since sin and flesh are often inextricable, like in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians where he calls everything from drunkenness to sorcery a “sin of the flesh”. After purgatory, when sin and flesh are gone for good, the clean, white bones are considered at peace and safely in heaven, which is why skeletons like the one on the façade are often shown with wings. But conversely, no burial means no peace. Though it’s not entirely orthodox, folk traditions imply that the dead can find themselves stuck in a netherworld between this world and the afterlife if they’re not given a Catholic burial.

Migrant workers in the farms outside of Rome were particularly susceptible to this fate. Malaria could kill them in the midst of their work and without family or friends to tend to them, weather and animals could ravage their corpse. The brothers in the Confraternity of Prayer and Death made the trip out to the countryside by foot and gathered these bodies year-round. It could take them four days to carry the dead back to Rome on their stretcher. They did this from 1552 to 1896. Their handwritten ledgers indicate that they picked up at least 8,600 bodies during those 344 years. If they passed a parish churchyard they would bury the workers there, but if not, they would carry them back to their oratory on via Giulia.

Today, the nuns who use the oratory open it for just a few hours every week while they pray for souls in purgatory. If you happen to find the church open, a donation to the sisters yields access to the crypt where you can see the lifetimes of work done by the brothers before them. Down there, you’re likely to be alone. The erratic hours mean that unlike Rome’s famous Capuchin crypt, there’s no line of nervously giggling tourists. It’s just you, the bone chandeliers, the engraved skulls, an altar full of legs and arms, and somewhat ominously, a scythe.

The overall effect is a bit ramshackle because we’re only seeing salvaged pieces of the original crypt. When the Tiber embankments were added in the late 19th century, the majority of the crypt and the order’s cemetery were destroyed. Including, unfortunately, the crypt’s theatre.

The scythe is actually nothing more than a theatrical prop, but somehow that’s even more unnerving than the real thing.

Here are a few images of how it once looked:
  In 1763 the confraternity built a stage in their crypt. They started using the corpses they collected in tableaux staged for the public called sacred representations. If you’ve ever seen one of those Christmas manger scenes where a real Baby Jesus is depicted more or less in a petting zoo, you’ve seen a sacred representation. The only difference was the confraternity was using dead people, not farm animals. 

They staged a sacred representation every year for the week following All Souls Day. It started simply with “The Burial of Jacob”. A few flat paintings were used as scenery and a corpse played Jacob’s corpse. Specific death scenes were always popular, The death of Judith, Jezebel, and St. Paul were all staged along with a few more universal tableaux, like “the allegory that we all must die”.

Every year the productions became more elaborate. By 1790 they had life-sized wax figures playing the roles of the living, dressed in costumes designed for the occasion.  In 1802 when they staged “The Mountain of Purgatory” they built a mountain surrounded by candelabra. The figure of Justice was perched up high holding scales and a sword. Beneath him you could see souls in the flames of purgatory. One lucky soul was shown being lifted by a cherub and taken up to heaven. When staged with actual dead people, it’s hard to make a scene like this any more literal. The sacred representations were seen as a useful teaching tool that transcended language and literacy barriers.

Other churches in Rome like Santa Maria in Trastevere and the now deconsecrated cemetery chapel of the Lateran put on similar, though less elaborate tableaux. But another place that rivaled the Baroque stagecraft of Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte was the hospital just across the Tiber—Santo Spirito.

If you visit Santo Spirito today, you won’t find a trace of the sacred representations, but there are eyewitness accounts and engravings of the shows that were performed in their graveyard starting in 1813. The confraternity there cared for the dead from the hospital and like the brothers at Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte, they had access to a large number of unknown or unclaimed bodies. In the days before the medicalization of death, dying at home was considered preferable and a hospital death was often a last resort for people who were poor and alone.

After sunset, theses brothers would come collect the dead from the hospital and carry them out to the cemetery. There, they would open one of the hospital’s 24 mass graves and lower in the naked body with chains. The bodies would stay there, unless they were cast in a sacred representation. A particularly noteworthy performance in 1831 depicted the final judgment. The mass graves were opened and the freshest corpses were costumed and propped up beneath a wax angel blowing the last trumpet. Fortunately, Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas left us with an engraving of this particular dramatization.

Starting in the early 19th century, Rome’s confraternities started to get some pushback from the pope on their use of bone and corpses. The final nail in the proverbial coffin of corpse theatre was hammered in when Rome joined unified Italy in 1870. A strict ban on burying people in convents, crypts or hospitals was enforced for the sake of public health. One of the last sacred representations was done at Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte in 1880. The brothers there preformed the “Vision of Ezekiel” in secret knowing their cemetery and their performances were about to become a thing of the past. In the end, their customs were as ephemeral as human flesh. 

More on this topic can be found at the recent post Sacred Italian Waxworks or The Last Judgement with Real Corpses, 18th and 19th Century Italy by clicking here.

Image List

1.  Insignia, or stemma, of the Confraternita dell'Orazione e Morte
2. "Chapelle de l'Eglise de la Mort" Engraved by Francois Alexandre Villain after Jean-Baptiste Thomas, Wellcome Images
3-8. Photographs by Elizabeth Harper
9-13. Images of Orazione e Morte on via Giulia ; Photographs from the Archives from the Roman Society of Natural History
14. "Dramatisation of Purgatory" at Santo Spirito; Engraved by Francois Alexandre Villain after Jean-Baptiste Thomas

SOURCES: Amadei, Emma. "Il Culto Dei Morti Nella Roma Dell'Ottocento." Archivio Storico Capitolino. 1 Jan. 1957. Web. 14 Oct. 2014.
L'Arciconfraternita Di S. Maria Dell'Orazione E Morte in Roma E Le Sue Rappresentazioni Sacre. Vol. 33. Rome: Roma, 1910. Print.

Transmitting Thought: The Maimonides Dream Lab: A New Film by Ronni Thomas for Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents!

Below, Filmmaker in Residence Ronni Thomas--director of The Midnight Archive--introduces the newest episode of his Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents film series. Entitled "Transmitting Thought: The Maimonides Dream Lab," this short film introduces us to psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner's provocative explorations of telepathic sensitivity and the dream state undertaken in 1960s Brooklyn.

You can view the film above or by clicking here; Stay tuned for more episodes which will premiere monthly on our new You Tube channel, which can be found here!

It is easy to subscribe to a set of rules when those rules are set by science rather than religion. But science lives with a bias -- that in order for an idea to be explored it must be observable, measurable and repeatable. Yet the irrational is part of our world, especially when it comes to the subject of human consciousness. Current scientific thinking brings an almost religious devotion to debunking anything that appears "irrational" or outside the rules and norms of core science. 

But such an approach leaves tremendous gaps in our understanding -- especially in questions of ESP, precognition, and other queries into non-physical intelligence. But this was not always the case. For a brief time, from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, the field of academic parapsychology flourished in the United States. And at the forefront of the field was the American psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner. In this film, Krippner discusses his research at the Maimonides Dream Lab in Brooklyn, NY in the 1960s. There, he and his colleagues conducted studies that explored the use of telepathy within the altered state of dreaming. 

Through numerous experiments, including one with the rock band The Grateful Dead, the Maimonides team produced substantial scientific research on the topic of ‘dream telepathy,’ until the demise of the lab's funding. Learn what we know -- and what we lost -- in Transmitting Thought : the Maimonides Dream Lab.  

— Ronni Thomas, Director

The Ether Dome: Guest Post by Sarah Alger

Following is a fascinating guest post about "The Ether Dome" and the world of pre-anesthesia surgery by Sarah Alger, director of the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital. You can follow her on Twitter at @slodoena.

“The horror of great darkness, and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close on despair, which swept through my mind and overwhelmed my heart, I can never forget, however gladly I would do so ... I still recall with unwelcome vividness the spreading out of the instruments, the twisting of the tourniquet, the first incision, the fingering of the sawed bone, the sponge pressed on the flap, the tying of the blood-vessels, the stitching of the skin, the bloody dismembered limb lying on the floor.”
Such was surgery before anesthesia, as described by George Wilson, who underwent an ankle amputation in 1843. 

When Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston was designed in the early 1800s, its operating theater was placed under a dome at the top of the building both to admit natural light through skylights and windows and to allow surgical patients’ screams to drift up and out of earshot of patients in the wards below. 

Not only was surgery a horror for the patient, it was also a trial for the surgeon. Contending with a conscious, writhing patient, surgeons were forced to be swift. Head surgeon and hospital co-founder John Collins Warren could reputedly amputate a limb in 40 seconds. 

While Warren was wrestling with his patients, about 100 miles away in Hartford, Conn., a dentist named Horace Wells attended a demonstration in which volunteers were given nitrous oxide—laughing gas—to get silly for the audience’s amusement. The gas seemed to dull pain in these volunteers, he observed, so he wondered: Could it help his dental patients? After a dozen successful painless tooth extractions in his practice (including on himself), he persuaded Harvard Medical School to allow him to demonstrate before a crowd. Yet his patient did claim to feel pain, perhaps because of inadequate dosage, and Wells was subjected to cries of “Humbug!” Wells slunk back to Hartford, discouraged. Yet his young apprentice, William T.G. Morton, picked up the research where Wells left off, befriending a Harvard chemist named Charles Jackson, who suggested that Morton experiment with sulfuric ether. (Ether, like nitrous oxide, was used as a party drug in so-called “ether frolics”.) Jackson appeared to know that ether could be useful in surgery, but for reasons lost to history, never acted on that knowledge. After successfully experimenting on family pets, himself and his dental patients, he lobbied to demonstrate on a surgical patient at Mass General. 

On the morning of October 16, 1846, a 21-year-old printer named Gilbert Abbott was brought into the operating theater. Warren, who was to operate on a vascular malformation on Abbott’s neck, and the assembled crowd in the tiered seats above waited for Morton to arrive. Finally, half an hour late, Morton arrived toting a glass inhaler he had commissioned for the demonstration. Warren, with impatience, stated: “Sir, your patient.” Morton used the inhaler to administer the gas, and when it appeared that Abbott had dropped off, he replied to Warren: “Sir, your patient.” Warren performed the surgery without incident, and the assembly waited for Abbott to awaken. When he did, he was asked: Did he feel any pain? “Has the procedure begun yet?” he responded, for he had felt only a dull scratching. At this Warren turned to the crowd and intoned: “Gentlemen, this is no humbug.” (For a 1936 silent reenactment of the event, starring contemporary Mass General staff in fake sideburns, click here.) 

Just a month later, Mass General surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow published a paper in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal about the demonstration, and from there the word spread. In Paris, the first operation using ether occurred December 15; in London, December 21. By 1847 the news had carried worldwide. Meanwhile, in Boston, dentist Nathan Cooley Keep became the first to administer ether for obstetrics—to poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife Fanny. “I am very sorry you all thought me so rash and naughty in trying the ether,” she wrote to her family. “I feel proud to be the pioneer to less suffering for poor, weak womankind.” It wasn’t just her family who had feared for her—it took a while for her to find someone who would administer ether. The embrace of anesthesia was not universal—physicians and the public alike had their qualms. Little was known about dosage, so the risk of death from anesthesia did exist, as did worries about ether’s flammability. Moreover, religious objections abounded—pain, not least in childbirth, was viewed as God’s will. Robert Liston, before performing that first surgery under ether in London, deemed ether a “Yankee dodge.” Yet upon witnessing how well it worked, he said: “This Yankee dodge beats mesmerism [a previous medical fad] hollow.” 

In 1853, Queen Victoria was administered chloroform at the birth of Prince Leopold, further legitimizing anesthesia’s use in obstetrics, and in the United States, the battlefield injuries of the Civil War sped its adoption. 

Yet as this miracle took hold, the key players in its discovery descended into controversy. Horace Wells, Charles Jackson and William T.G. Morton waged bitter pamphleteering wars for 20 years over who should get the credit. (Jackson, it must be noted, also claimed to have given Samuel Morse the idea for the telegraph—to what extent that’s true, we’ll never know.) The debate reached Congress, which ruled in favor of Morton because he had published first. Wells moved to New York, was arrested for throwing acid on prostitutes, and killed himself in jail after taking chloroform; Jackson died at McLean Asylum outside Boston; and Morton, becoming feverish after reading a newspaper article arguing that Jackson should get most of the credit, threw himself into a pond in Central Park and died soon after. Meanwhile, a Georgia country doctor named Crawford Long, having attended ether frolics, had conducted a successful painless surgery in March 1842, but did not publish his news until well after the Mass General demonstration, escaping both the limelight and the concurrent misery. 

The surgical theater at Mass General, which came to be known as the Ether Dome, still stands in the hospital’s original building. A teaching skeleton, a plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere, and an Egyptian mummy named Padihershef, who was a gift to the hospital in the 1820s, all keep watch over the Dome as they did in 1846. A newer addition is a 2000 oil painting recreating a moment during the surgery. Abbott is bound to the surgical chair by a leather strap, as was typical practice then, but there is no need for it: His hands are slack. He is at peace. 

Image: Ether Dome. Massachusetts General Hospital.

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future: An Interview with Paleofuture's Matt Novak by Cristina Preda

Following is a guest post by Cristina Preda in which she interviews Matt Novak of the Paleofuture blog about one of her favorite books residing in the Morbid Anatomy Library: Corn and Horrigan's Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future.

In 1984, the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. opened Yesterday’s Tomorrows, an exhibition showcasing hundreds of objects and ephemera from the American mid-century as they pertained to people’s visions of the future, and a book by the same name was published as a companion. Written by the exhibit’s curators, historians Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterday’s Tomorrows explores the communities, homes, transportation, weapons and warfare of our supposed future. Copies of the book eventually found their way into the Morbid Anatomy Library and into the hands of Matt Novak, writer of Gizmodo’s Paleofuture blog. I spoke to Matt recently about American retro-futures, collecting, and how an exhibit he never saw changed his life. 

How did you come to discover Yesterday’s Tomorrows? 
Back in 2007 I was finishing up school at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and was looking for a topic for a blog for this class I had started. It was a writing class where you start a blog, and I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. There’d been this idea that I’d been thinking about for a long time which was how people of the past imagined the future. So, I started the blog and expected it to be just something that would run its course through the class. The more I researched it, the more I loved the topic, and I came across this book called Yesterday’s Tomorrows which really helped solidify that this was something worth exploring further. After I was done with school, I reached out to one of the authors of the book, Brian Horrigan, and it turned out he lived literally a mile down the street from me. 

You mentioned that he gifted you some of the artifacts from the original exhibit. What were they?
Some books and magazines, some really unique one-of-a-kind stuff like personal letters from Buckminster Fuller, some photos. [Brian Horrigan] interviewed Buckminster Fuller shortly before he died in the early eighties and gave me some recordings from that, illustrations and photos from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, film stills from old futuristic movies like Things To Come, old newspaper clippings, and a bunch of things he used to help do the Smithsonian exhibit and the book.  

Did you consider yourself a collector prior to receiving those items?
I was kind of a collector before that. I almost immediately started buying old books and magazines. Part of the mission of the blog was to introduce new things to the internet. So many people think of blogging as just regurgitating images and reblogging, and I was trying to digitize stuff to help contribute to the strange, beautiful, weird thing that we call the internet. I think that’s part of why I was lucky enough to be successful with it. I was putting stuff online that people hadn’t seen yet. 

What is your most prized item?
That’s a tough question! There’s this one letter from Buckminster Fuller that’s written in his own hand. My favorite part about it is he underlines the year 1974 and puts a couple exclamation points after it. I just love that detail that speaks to his excitement that it’s the future. I have a couple video phones from the 1980s. I’m obsessed with the video phone because it’s something that arrived but not in the form that we expected. I think that that’s what makes it interesting—that even if someone is absolutely correct the prediction is often in the eye of the beholder. 

A lot of architectural imagery up until the 50s depicts these grand vertical sprawls with impossibly tall buildings interconnected by bridges and roadways. After WWII, communities begin to sprawl outward. Would you agree that the shift was informed by, say, McCarthyism and espousing the virtues of American capitalism and individualism? And in this regard, does the role of prognosticators become implicitly entangled with toeing the party line?
If you’re looking at consumer-based futurism, of course there’s a certain aspect of conformity. I think I take issue with the idea that the first half of the 20th century was only about moving upward. That’s certainly a vision of the future that architects embraced, especially in the 20s with the huge rise of the skyscrapers. But there’s significant pushback when you look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of utopian futuristic society in the 1930s. His Broadacre scheme was a scheme to push people out—it was an early vision of suburban America. We often like to think that a dominant narrative of any given era’s futurism is the only one. We have to remind ourselves that people in any given generation don’t all think alike. I fall into this trap everyday and I have to continually pull myself back and remind myself that no matter how dominant a narrative was, there was always someone who said, “wait a second here, this not how it should be done and this is not how it’s going to be.” 

I noticed that the workplace of tomorrow is missing from the book and that struck me as odd since Americans are so work-obsessed. You talk about this in The Late Great American Promise of Less Work. What happened that made it so un-American to imagine a less laborious future?
It seems to me that we have decided that it’s un-American to aspire to work less, which is very strange. Even people in the 1950s and 60s who were conservatively-minded believed that taking long vacations was a sign that you were doing something right. There does seem to be this incredible shift that happens in the second half of the 20th century where it’s no longer the ideal, where desiring to work less so that you can either spend more time at leisure or with your family is somehow seen as un-American. It’s disconcerting, especially given that we don’t have the same rights that a lot of other developed nations do when it comes to maternity leave and guaranteed vacation time. It’s almost as if there’s been a narrative that has totally warped and is currently poisoning our culture that the only thing you should aspire to is to work yourself to death.

Do you think there’s any getting back to that mid-century dream?
I don’t see the tide turning any time soon, but I think it very well could if the wealth gap continues to grow. So much of our current troubles have to do with that wealth gap, and if it continues to to grow there will be people who realize that government does have a role to play in certain things such as parental leave. These are basic things that every other developed country has figured out that aren’t even on the national agenda.  

Regarding the home of tomorrow, you point out that people in those years were preoccupied with protecting their homes from the elements. How much of that had to do with actual comfort and how much was escapism vis-a-vis fear of nuclear warfare?
There was almost a “fallout shelter chic” to a lot of things. You see this in a lot of mid-century modern design. 

You’ve promised to eat the sun if the AeroMobil flying car is actually released to the public in two years. I agree with your points as to why it won’t happen. It’s so impractical that it’s stupid, and we need to get over the flying car. Where would you like to see future transportation go instead?
Personally, a combination of more mass transit and better alternative fuel for passenger cars. I live in LA, and for a couple years I didn’t have a car which astounded people. 

The last chapter in the book deals with the weapons and warfare of the future. Have we accepted that war is just inevitable for life on earth, or do we like it? I feel like futurism, and especially retrofuturism, is generally so optimistic that it’s eery. Why aren’t we imagining peace? Why are we just thinking of better, bigger ways to bomb everyone?
I think because our economy depends so much on it that we can’t imagine any other way. There’s a couple different angles by which to approach this. One is to look at removing troops from the battlefield. That was one tactic of making war less horrific. There were some visions of the future from the 1930s where giant robots would do battle, and that plays into the idea of remote war. You’re seeing this a lot today where someone sitting at a computer screen is controlling a drone halfway around the world, and that’s really not a new idea but it is one that’s becoming very much a reality in a lot of aspects of warfare today. We’re also seeing that those tactics don’t necessarily work better when it comes to defeating an enemy. When you can’t see the enemy you don’t know if you’re bombing your intended target or a mass of school children. There’s also this idea that we see time and again of people who thought that if you make war so horrific it would no longer be a thing. Nuclear weapons would make war so horrific that nations would no longer go to war, which obviously wasn’t the case. And the same goes for other futuristic weapons—let’s make things so bad that there’ll just be a stalemate and no one would ever go to war. Obviously, that never pans out. 

Joseph Corn’s challenge to you was that you never accept preconceived notions about people and their attitudes toward the future. What advice would you give someone just beginning to approach this field today?
I would say if you’re interested in this topic, look in unusual places for aspects of futurism. It’s so easy to pick up a sci-fi book from the 50s and say this is a vision of the future. What interests me more these days are weird nooks and crannies where you can find a lot of interesting futurisms in areas you wouldn’t expect. This is what makes the topic so fascinating to me. It’s not just flying cars and jetpacks. There’s the futurism of social movements, the futurism of utopian communities, the futurism of pets. You can look at any topic and there’s people who had predictions about that particular area and had some really unique ways of looking at it. The study of past futures has definitely matured since I started eight years ago, and you can find all sorts of weird stories in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect them to be. 

IMAGE LIST

1. Illustration from Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ by Frank R. Paul, 1925
2. “Trade Your Troubles for a Bubble,” back cover from Amazing Stories, 1946
3. Rick Guidice, “Sport in Space Colony,” circa 1977
4. Syd Mead, “Megastructure,” circa 1969
5. Still from the H.G. Wells film Things to Come, 1936.
6. Un voyage dans la lune, 1902.

X-Ray Audio: Guest Post by Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld

Below is a guest post in which our good friend Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld tells the fascinating story of what he terms "X-Ray Audio," aka Soviet-era bootleg records made from second hand X-Ray plates and containing forbidden western music such as jazz and rock and roll; See images above for a few examples.

On Friday, May 8th, Coates and Aleks Kolkowski will teach us more about the subject in an image, film and sound filled presentation at The Morbid Anatomy Museum entitled The X-Ray Audio Project: The Incredible story of Bootleg Technology, Cold War Culture and Human Endeavour, sponsored by Art in the Age spirits. You can find out more  here. You can also find more about Coates' project--and see more images and hear audio!--on his X-Ray Audio project website by clicking here.

X-RAY AUDIO

They are images of pain and damage inscribed with the ghostly sounds of forbidden pleasure. They are fragile pictures of the inside of Soviet citizens overlayed with the music they secretly loved. I first saw one when I was wandering in a market in St. Petersburg a few years ago with Russian friends. It looked somewhat like record and somewhat like an x-ray. My friends didn't know what it was and the man who sold it to me seemed dismissive.  I brought it home and tried to learn more. My research was the beginning of journey that led to a strange and poignant story. It is a story of Forbidden Culture, Bootleg technology and most of all, of Human Endeavor.  

In the Soviet Union in the years after the Second World War, a lot of music was forbidden. Most Western music was forbidden just because it was Western. The official reason given might be that it was decadent or bourgeois, but really it was just because it was American or British and we were the enemy. A lot of Russian music was also forbidden. Anything made by emigres, those White Russians who had left after the revolution, was off-limits because by definition they were considered traitors, whatever their repertoire and even if they had once been approved of. And much domestic Russian music was forbidden, or at the very least deemed 'unofficial'. Why?

From 1932, all Soviet art, literature, poetry, film and music was subject to a censor. The ideologues of the Soviet Union determined that all the arts had to be in the service of socialist realism. Self expression was out. Much popular  music, especially those in the  'criminal' or 'gyspy' genres were deemed to be 'low culture' and would not pass the censor.  Perhaps it showed the dark side of Socialist Realism or portrayed violence, jealousy or the rough and tumble of love and lust and life.  Even certain rhythms such as the foxtrot and tango were forbidden as they were said to lead to lewd behaviour and general frivolity.

But people had a huge  desire to hear this music, it was their culture. They wanted to hear songs that were played in the gulag or sung by those who had returned; songs from earlier, less-controlled times; songs by artists who they had once loved  but were now forbidden, even songs they had heard played by a local singer at a secret concert. And of course there was a demand for the exotic, cool sounds of Western music: boogie-woogie; rock & roll or jazz. But official records of this music would be rare and very expensive. And so a bootleg culture arose.

We had such a culture in the West too once  - illicit live recordings of concerts made on vinyl or tape in the days before the internet changed everything. But even if illegal, these were relatively easy to make. In the Soviet Union after the war, it was not so easy. The bootleggers' first technical problem, obtaining a machine to record with, was relatively straightforward. Literature existed from the 1930s explaining recording techniques and various recording machines had been brought back from Germany as trophies after the war. These could be adapted or copied but a further problem existed. You couldn't just go and buy the discs to record on. The state completely controlled the means of manufacturing records.

But an extraordinary alternative source of raw materials was discovered - used x-ray plates obtained from local hospitals. And that is where this story begins. Many older people in Russia remember seeing strange vinyl-type discs when they were young. The discs had partial images of skeletons on them and were called 'bones' or 'ribs'. They contained ghostly music - music that had been forbidden. This practice of copying music onto x-rays got going in Leningrad, a port where it was easier to obtain illicit records, but it spread, first to Moscow and then throughout the Soviet Union. 

With the photographer Paul Heartfield, for the last couple of years I have been interviewing and collecting images for The X-Ray Audio project, an initiative to record the testimony of people who were involved in this incredible trade. As well as live events, an exhibition and a documentary, we will be publishing a book about the x-ray bootlegs and the people who made them with Strange Attractor Press in Autumn 2015.

And we are also making new x-ray records. At our live events, sound artist and researcher Aleks Kolkowski cuts new plates using a vintage analogue record-cutting lathe from music written especially for the occasion - or from live performances

X-Ray Audio is a story about strange skeletal flexi-discs for sure, but it is really a story of people. People for whom music held a value it probably never can for us. People for who the sound of the music they really loved was only available 'off the bone'.

Stephen Coates
www.x-rayaudio.squarespace.com

Images: X-Ray Records, Photos by Paul Heartfield

Fragments of Faith: Victorian Hairwork: A New Film by Ronni Thomas for Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents!

Below, film maker in residence Ronni Thomas--director of The Midnight Archive--introduces his newest film for our new Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents series, on Victorian hair art jewelry, with Karen Bachmann, teacher of our popular class on the same topic.

You can view the film above or by clicking here; Stay tuned for more episodes which will premiere monthly on our new You Tube channel, which can be found here!

Victorian Hair work was one of those things I just didn't 'get' at first... But I looked into it anyway. Karen Bachmann is a friend, colleague and fellow NYC born reformed (to some degree) street punk, and happens to be the authority on the subject, combining academic knowledge with charm and flair... It wasn't until I screened the film for my sister in law that I finally 'got it'. She has no specific interest in the morbid or the tragically designed, but she reacted pretty impressively to this film... Forgive me for this but: it's hair, AND jewelry combined... It's for women... (With impeccable taste). Once I shifted my perspective from subjective to objective, it all made sense and flowed editorially. These are amazingly designed works of elaborate art incorporating skill and sentiment in pitch perfect harmony.  

"George's Arms" : A Guest Post by Evan Michelson, Morbid Anatomy Scholar in Residence and Star of TV's Oddities

Following is a guest post by Evan Michelson, Morbid Anatomy Library scholar in residence and star of TV's Oddities. Here, she tells the fascinating story of "George's Arms" (seen above), her contribution to our current Collector's Cabinet exhibition, which closes March 29th.

You can see Evan speak in person about objects in her collection at our closing party on March 29th, on which more here; you can also purchase a full color, illustrated exhibition catalog with texts written by the collectors (only eight dollars!) here.

Antique and vintage prosthetics are uncanny, beautiful objects. They are almost always anonymous, whatever stories they have to tell being limited (at best) to a name inked or carved into the wood. This particular pair of prosthetic arms, however, comes not just with a name, but with an inspiring tale of survival, courage and human resilience. They belonged to Mr. George Hunlock of Danville, PA, a brakeman for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. The railroad carried both freight (primarily coal) and passengers along a busy route from Pennsylvania to upstate New York. These arms date to the turn of the 20th century, but Mr. Hunlock’s horrific accident occurred a bit earlier, sometime in the 1880s. At that time, George Hunlock’s job as railroad brakeman was one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.

In the early days of the railroad brakes had to be gradually, manually engaged on each individual car. This meant that the brakeman had to jump from car to car on the roof of a moving train (often braving the bitter cold and dangerous, icy conditions). On freight lines the brakeman usually rode in an open cabin on the outside of the car; sometimes he simply clung to a ladder, or even rode on the roof. In the summer the brakeman baked in the sun, in the winter he froze in snow and ice. When it rained, he was drenched. It was dirty, exhausting work. The brakes were engaged using heavy wheels or levers; it was a gradual process that involved repeated trips back-and-forth along the length of the train. It was not uncommon for brakemen to be mangled or killed on the job (one early report estimated that 10 brakemen died every day in the US in the performance of their duties). Brakemen were very poorly paid, and the job was often allotted to the illiterate and uneducated (presumably because such people were considered to be the most expendable). In the 19th century the railroad companies were shielded from lawsuits, and the costs associated with injury were often not compensated: even if a brakeman survived his accident, his family was still facing financial ruin.

There is no detailed record of the accident itself, but George Hunlock (like so many before him) apparently slipped underneath a moving railroad car, and his arms were crushed (or possibly severed altogether). Such an accident would be catastrophic today, but in the late 19th century survival itself would have seemed nearly miraculous. Antiseptics, anesthesia and the sterilization of instruments in surgical amputations were still relatively primitive procedures, and pain killers were opiate derivatives that eventually caused addiction. Mr. Hunlock undoubtedly benefitted, however, from advancements made during the recently-concluded American Civil War, which had brought about a revolution in the science of limb amputation.

It is extraordinary, then, that George Hunlock did not just survive his terrible ordeal - he thrived. He was given another job at the railroad, where he served as a watchman at crossings, using his wooden arms to wave a lantern to warn of oncoming trains. His arms (provided by J.Condell and Son) are heavy by today’s standards - stiff, wooden affairs - and the fingers (with the exception of a spring-loaded thumb) are not fully articulated. Despite this lack of prosthetic dexterity, George Hunlock mastered his new limbs: he could eat, light his pipe and (most incredibly) he developed handwriting that was “clear and distinct.” Contemporary newspaper reports say that he wrote “better with his wooden hand than most men can with their natural hands.”

George's prosthetic arms were found at a house sale many years ago, packed in a wooden box labeled “Dad’s Arms.” They were accompanied by newspaper articles detailing Mr. Hunlock’s bravery. Also in the box was all his correspondence with the limb manufacturers, and a stack of old ledgers (signed “George Hunlock”) from George’s second career as a tobacconist. The account books contain neat, precise handwriting that span several years. The dealer who bought the arms was told by a family member that the writing (incredibly enough) is George’s very own.

The Return of the Repressed: Sick Humor from Both Sides of the Atlantic: Guest Post by A.J. Mell

Following is a guest post by Morbid Anatomy Museum A.J. Mell docent on the mid-20th century phenomenon of "sick humor," as inspired by The Penguin Book of Sick Verse, a book which he suggested for (and which now resides in) the Morbid Anatomy Library. Hope you enjoy!

The Return of the Repressed: Sick Humor from Both Sides of the Atlantic
By A.J. Mell

Among the obscure jewels to be found in the Morbid Anatomy Library is The Penguin Book of Sick Verse, a British poetry anthology which never came out in America and hasn’t been reissued since its publication in 1963.

I first learned about it through a passing reference in Rob Young’s history of the British folk-rock movement, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (Faber and Faber, 2011). Apparently the collection was a favorite of Fairport Convention founder Richard Thompson, whose own mordant lyrics might fit nicely into an updated edition. (He also set music to one of the book’s offerings, George Painter’s “The Lobster,” which appears on Fairport’s eponymous debut album.) Inspired by the irresistible title and the imprimatur of one of my musical heroes, I sought the book out online and found a well-seasoned but readable copy for about fifteen bucks. 

How sick is it? Well, rather than quote specific poems, I’ll list some favorite entries from the index of first lines, to give an idea of the tone:

A ghost of a mouldy larder is one thing

Ah, dog. Here is my boot. Does it stink good?

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now

In sad and ashie weeds I sigh

Inert in his chair

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange

Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain

My head is bald, my breath is bad

O hideous little bat, the size of snot

Sometimes just being alone seems the bad thing

The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers

When I died the devils tortured me with icepicks and pliers 

And so on. The book contains no poems in translation, so seemingly obvious candidates like Baudelaire make no appearance, but editor George MacBeth drew broadly and deeply from the miasmic corners of British and American literature with satisfying results. The collection spans the Elizabethan era to the mid-20th century, and is helpfully arranged into eight sections: Illness, Mental Breakdown, Visions of Doom, World-Weariness, Corpse Love, Lovesickness, Cruelty, and Sick Jokes. “What some have called a fascination with obscenity or disaster,” MacBeth writes in his introduction, “may only be a wise foresight, an anxiety to know the worst, an eagerness to explore the most exquisite and the most intense. The extreme situation can be terrible in the form of love; but it can also be a source of wisdom in the form of terror.” Relatively little light verse or scurrilous doggerel finds its way into these pages; the emphasis is on Quality Lit, and venerable names like Auden, Blake, Marlowe, Poe, Shelley and Wilde. Among MacBeth’s contemporaries, he saw fit to include Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and a smattering of others.

I am only an occasional poetry reader, and miles from being an expert, but the editor in me can’t help weighing in on possible candidates for a revised, updated edition. Such a volume would almost have to include Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning,” for example, or any number of works by that poet laureate of disappointment, Philip Larkin. It might be a poignant touch to include one of George MacBeth’s own later poems, in which he explored the toll taken on his life and marriage by the motor neuron disease that ultimately killed him. Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” from 1732, was probably still too rancid for general consumption in 1963, but its expression of epic loathing for human (or at least female) physicality makes it a strong candidate for most neurotic poem in the Western canon. Still, if anything is conspicuous by its absence, it’s the “sound and fury” speech from Shakespeare’s Macbeth – for me, the most sonorous, gobsmacking, and profound poem in English. 

On the other hand, I felt personally validated by the inclusion, albeit with slight variations and an anonymous attribution, of the first verse of “Antigonish” by Hughes Mearns. Most people seem to find it innocuous enough – it was adapted into a hit song by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, for God’s sake – but it always struck an existential chill in my heart, like a cross between Edward Lear and Samuel Beckett:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today,

I wish, I wish he’d go away…

Shudder.

Still, it’s doubtful that a book entitled The Penguin Book of Sick Verse could have been hatched any time other than the late ‘50s – early ‘60s, a time when the concept of “sick” was very much in the air. 

It didn’t take a whole lot to be considered deviant in post-war America, and the word “sick” came to be applied to any form of behavior or artistic expression that questioned the suburban pieties. (If one is to believe the cartoons and sitcoms of the era, the word was also a common term of approbation among beatniks, as in “Sick, man, sick!”) Everyone was busy hypnotizing themselves into believing that everything was perfectly normal, that the war hadn’t really changed anything – when it fact it had changed everything, irrevocably. Combine that with the midcentury vogue for Freudian psychoanalysis, and the stage was set for the Return of the Repressed. Presiding over the emerging chaos was that gap-toothed imp of the perverse, Alfred E. Neuman – a figure whose lineage has been traced back to advertisements from the late 19th century, but who reached his apotheosis in the ‘50s and ‘60s as the mascot for Mad magazine and avatar of an irreverent new age that took nothing at face value. (Nineteen-sixty even saw the debut of a Mad knockoff called. . . wait for it. . . Sick.)

At the other end of the spectrum was Time magazine, then the semi-official voice of mainstream liberalism and guardian of middlebrow “good taste.” In July of 1959, it published “The Sickniks,” which cast a wary and largely disapproving eye on the new generation of anti-establishment comics then making waves in American nightclubs. (As for the title, this was the era when everyone was on edge about the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik. For awhile, it was trendy among journalists to add a “-nik” suffix to everything they wished to dismiss and/or tar with the brush of Godless Communism; thus “beatniks,” “peaceniks,” etc.)

“They joked about father and Freud, about mother and masochism, about sister and sadism,” the anonymous Time article begins. “They delightedly told of airline pilots’ throwing out a few passengers to lighten the load, of a graduate school for dope addicts, of parents so loving that they always ‘got upset if anyone else made me cry.’ They attacked motherhood, childhood, adulthood, sainthood. And in perhaps a dozen nightclubs across the country. . . . audiences paid stiff prices to soak it up. For the ‘sick’ comedians, life’s complexion has never looked so green.”

The article rounds up an impressively diverse and brilliant array of comics under the “sick” banner: topical comedian Mort Sahl, who drew most of his material from the New York Times; improv master Jonathan Winters (“a roly-poly brainy-zany,” in Time-ese); the neurotic but relatively mainstream Shelley Berman; erudite sketch artists Nichols and May; and acerbic satirist and song parodist Tom Lehrer.

But Time directs its harshest criticism at, predictably enough, Lenny Bruce, whose fate it was to bear the brunt of mainstream hostility and, by falling on his sword, make it possible for future comedians to speak freely without fear. From the article: “Although audiences unquestionably laugh at Bruce, much of the time he merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the way of the world (on religious leaders: ‘They have missed the boat. “Thou shall not kill,” they say, and then one of them walks comfortingly to the death chamber with Caryl Chessman.’)”. For his part, Bruce fired back in his routine “The Tribunal”: “The kind of sickness I wish Time had written about, is that school teachers in Oklahoma get a top annual salary of $4000, while Sammy Davis Jr. gets $10,000 for a week in Vegas.”

Nowadays, few people would raise an eyebrow at Bruce’s take on religious hypocrisy, but in the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, the very concept of criticizing organized religion in a comedy routine seemed alien and frightening. What links revolutionary figures like Bruce with a relatively genteel poetry collection from across the pond is that both reflect an era when a handful of brave souls realized that truth-telling mattered more than social decorum. Popular culture no longer aimed to please everybody, all the time; it dared to be divisive, ask tough questions, and look frankly at subjects once considered beyond the pale. And lo and behold, it worked.

In 2015, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher routinely broadcast material that goes beyond what Lenny Bruce was arrested for, both in savagery and profanity, and they are adored by millions. By contrast, the once-safe humor of mainstream icon Bob Hope, rife with casual sexism and homophobia, now seems retrograde and embarrassing in the extreme. The sickniks won, and we’re all the healthier for it.