Death in America and the Green Cemetery Movement
An Illustrated lecture by funeral director Amy Cunningham
Date: Thursday, November 7
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $8
Location:
Observatory, Brooklyn (543 Union Street (at Nevins), Brooklyn, NY 11215)
Each
year in the U.S., the death care industry buries enough formaldehyde to
fill eight Olympic sized swimming pools, enough metal in caskets form
to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge, and enough concrete in burial vaults
to construct a two-lane highway running halfway across the country.
While our cemeteries are rich with national and local histories, natural
habitats and remembrances of the dead, they’re also a blazing locus of
waste and pollution.
In tonight's illustrated lecture, funeral
director Amy Cunningham will share the history of American death
practices from Victorian family-centric rituals to contemporary ideas of
the "green cemetery," a grassroots movement dedicated to the
development of ecologically responsible and meaningful end-of-life
rituals.
Amy Cunningham is a New York licensed funeral director
and celebrant who specializes in helping families plan sustainable
end-of-life rituals. A former magazine journalist, she maintains a blog
called
TheInspiredFuneral.com.
_______________________________________________
Mother Machine: an ‘Uncanny Valley’ in the Eighteenth Century
Illustrated lecture with Dr. Brandy Schillace
Date: Thursday, November 21
Admission: $8
Time: 8:00 PM
Location:
Observatory, Brooklyn (543 Union Street (at Nevins), Brooklyn, NY 11215)
Known
by a variety of names—“this most curious machine,” “this mock woman,”
and the “celebrated Apparatus” —Dr. William Smellie’s mechanized
obstetrical phantom was both science and spectacle in the eighteenth
century. Strangely, however, though crucial to the training of at least
900 man-midwives in ten years, the machine disappears from both the
actual and rhetorical "scene" of 18th-century obstetrical science.
This
illustrated talk will explore the mitigating factors contributing to
the machine's disappearance. Why was such a valuable teaching tool
auctioned to the public after Smellie’s death? Why did famed
obstetrician William Hunter agree to sell his own copy of the machine to
Dr. Foster of the Dublin Rotunda? And why—after so much popular
debate—does the machine disappear from public notice by the latter part
of the century? Dr. Schillace will also document her own rather
circuitous journey of discovery, that is, the necessary labor of
unearthing (if not birthing) a medical artifact’s unusual history.
Dr. Brandy Schillace
is an interdisciplinary, medical-humanist scholar. She writes about
cultural production, history of science, and intersections of medicine
and literature. She is the managing editor of
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry,
an international journal of cross-cultural health research and a guest
curator and blogger for the Dittrick Medical History Museum. Dr.
Schillace was the keynote speaker for the annual meeting of the
Archivists and Librarians in the History of Health Sciences 2013, and is
the recent recipient of the Chawton House Library Fellowship (for study
of 18th century women writers) and the Wood Institute travel grant from
the Philadelphia College of Physicians. She has also an edited book
collection under contingent contract with Cambria Press:
Birthing the Monster of Tomorrow: Unnatural Reproductions. For a selection of recently published work, please visit
http://fictionreboot-dailydose.com/publications-and-press.
Image: A
late eighteenth-century “birthing phantom.” Unlike Smellie’s machine,
these were not intended to be exactly like the living body, but rather a
basic replica allowing midwives to understand the position of the child
in the birth canal.
By permission of the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum
_______________________________________________
“Children of the Night”: Dracula, Degeneration and Syphilitic Births at the Fin de Siècle
Illustrated lecture with Dr. Brandy Schillace and custom cocktails and DJed music by
Friese Undine
Date: Friday, November 22
Admission: $10
Time: 8:00 PM
Location:
Observatory, Brooklyn (543 Union Street (at Nevins), Brooklyn, NY 11215)
Bram Stoker’s
Dracula is often read as a narrative of reverse colonization, revealing fears of degeneration at the
fin de siècle.
Anxieties over the decline of empire and—as both symptom and
consequence—the degeneration of masculinity in Victorian Britain
resulted in a number of dystopic narratives, each revealing an uneasy
relationship between evolution and devolution, sexuality, sexual
identity and mental health. However, the signal terror of Stoker’s
vampires lies not only in their overt sexuality and promiscuity—but also
in their fecundity. As Van Helsing warns, the vampire is not a single
foe but a potential army. Both “father” and unnatural mother, Count
Dracula is capable of reproducing the undead—and yet his victims do not,
it seems reproduce themselves.
In this presentation Dr. Schillace
will explore accounts of syphilitic infection as a means of
understanding the complexities of infection among the “innocents,” Lucy
Westenra and the children she victimizes. Culminating in a
re-examination of the only human birth in Stoker’s novel—Mina Harker’s
son Quincy—this project seeks to provide new insight into 19th century
anxieties about degeneration’s naissance.
Dr. Brandy Schillace
is an interdisciplinary, medical-humanist scholar. She writes about
cultural production, history of science, and intersections of medicine
and literature. She is the managing editor of
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry,
an international journal of cross-cultural health research and a guest
curator and blogger for the Dittrick Medical History Museum. Dr.
Schillace was the keynote speaker for the annual meeting of the
Archivists and Librarians in the History of Health Sciences 2013, and is
the recent recipient of the Chawton House Library Fellowship (for study
of 18th century women writers) and the Wood Institute travel grant from
the Philadelphia College of Physicians. She also an edited book
collection under contingent contract with Cambria Press:
Birthing the Monster of Tomorrow: Unnatural Reproductions. For a selection of recently published work, please visit
http://fictionreboot-dailydose.com/publications-and-press.
