Caitlin Doughty's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory" : Book Review by Tonya Hurley

Last week, our friend Caitlin Doughty came to the Morbid Anatomy Museum to talk about her new book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory. Tonya Hurley--acclaimed young adult novelist and a founding member of the museum--very kindly agreed to write the following review of the book for this blog; you can find out more about Tonya and her work by clicking here. You can order a copy of the book by clicking here.

Spoiler alert – WE ALL DIE.

But as first time author Caitlin Doughty notes in her brilliantly macabre, darkly comic memoir Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory,  “looking our mortality in the eye is no easy feat.” In fact, for many, it is impossible, conjuring up our greatest fears and worst memories. An undeniable fact which Doughty acknowledges and then summarily dismisses as she urges her readers to ‘leave their metaphorical blindfolds at the door” as she pulls back “the formaldehyde curtain” on the American funeral industry. As you would expect, Doughty explores the taboo topic of death rituals as she chronicles her time working at a crematorium and eventually attending mortuary school. More than just an eye-in-the-sky expose, however, the book is also a very personal account, delivering an insider’s unvarnished look at what happens to our bodies after we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil.

Witty, humorous and profoundly insightful, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes documents Doughty’s days at Westwind Crematorium, where eager and green behind the ears, she tells a tale that skillfully leads the reader into her secret world, part Pied Piper, part Charon, transporter of souls across the river Styx. She describes the quirky, and often philosophical, characters that make up her workplace and pass through its doors and cremation machines. To her credit, she doesn’t hold back, giving the reader tantalizing morsels of horrifying details leavened by playful humor and historical facts about death rituals around the world ranging from the post-mortem cannibalism of the Wari people to Egyptian preservation – which is closest to our western practices to Tibetan sky burial courtesy of the vultures. 

Doughty, who’s life-long obsession with death informs Smoke, generously mixes details of her personal life  -- considering the exact moment when she became obsessed with death as a child after witnessing a little girl plummet in the mall -- with revolutionary ideas about how to treat our dead in a more ethical, green and loving ways. There are many laugh-out-loud moments -- “Hi, this is Amy from Science support; I’m dropping off some heads”-- and moments that will make you sick in the pit of your stomach like when she describes Mike, her Westwind mentor, preparing bodies in graphic detail. There are also such gut-wrenching moments as when she talks about the baby section of the freezer -- which they call the Sad Garden -- or when she cremates a young drug addict who, close to her age, is all alone with no one to give him a proper send off, his  mother relieved to no longer have to search the streets for him at night.

This book is entertaining, relatable, and revolutionary -- one that just might change your [after]life. She exposes the corporate funeral home trend and blows the whistle on the “beautiful death memory” they market. Doughty’s passion is contagious and her knowledge is boundless. She is a most likeable narrator, so likeable that you might end up wanting her to pull the switch at the crematorium before you become that “beautiful fire.”

Who should read this book: Fans of Roach’s Stiff, Mitford’s American Way of Death,  and/ or anyone who plans on dying someday.

To learn more about Doughty’s mission – visit the Order of the Good Death website and be sure to check out her Ask a Mortician videos. 

In short: A funny, insightful must-read for anyone who is planning to die. 

Tonya Hurley is a New York Times and international bestselling author of the ghostgirl series and The Blessed Trilogy. She created two television shows, has written and directed award-winning films broadcast on IFC and PBS, and is a founding board member of the Morbid Anatomy Museum.

"Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch," Book Review by Charles Wolfe and Benjamin Goldberg

My friend Charles Wolfe of Ghent University / University of Sydney has just sent along a review he co-wrote with Benjamin Goldberg of one of the most prized (and costly!) books in the Morbid Anatomy Library: Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch, a biography by Luuc Kooijmans.

He has kindly allowed me to publish an excerpt here:

Outside of historians of medicine, or of Dutch science, not many of us are particularly familiar with the Dutch anatomist, apothecary, “municipal obstetrician,” museum curator, and compleat naturalist Frederik Ruysch (1638– 1731), unless we are also frequent visitors to blogs with names such as Morbid Anatomy—for Ruysch’s anatomical preparations really were sui generis, one of a kind, somewhere in between scientifically remarkable, extremely useful in the progress of anatomical knowledge, and magnificently quirky and disturbing. His “prepared” embryos and small children were frequently described as being asleep rather than dead. Balzac, in his 1831 novel La peau de chagrin (which has been variously translated as The Magic Skin or TheWild Ass Skin), has the main character enter a curiosity shop and see what he thinks is a sleeping child; it turns out to be a lost “item” from Ruysch’s anatomical collection.

Kooijmans also tells the story of the Emperor Peter the Great (who bought Ruysch’s collection, which presently is in St. Petersburg, having experienced some ups and downs in the standards of preservation over the years) kneeling to kiss a “sleeping child” embalmed by Ruysch. We can get this uncanny Ruyschian effect for ourselves—albeit mediated by oil paint—if we look at the wonderful, Rembrandt-inspired painting of Ruysch and friends entitled The Anatomy Lesson of Frederik Ruysch (above) by Adriaan Backer (1670; in the Amsterdam Historical Museum), which Kooijmans has reproduced. As contrasted with any other “anatomy lesson” painting, the corpse here looks much more like a sleeping person than a dead body. This is also the theme in a remarkable piece of literature that Kooijmans barely discusses, Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogue between Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies,” in his 1824 Operette morali, which is a meditation on death and the uncanny “life-likeness” of the preserved bodies (which Leopardi calls mummies).

The point that Ruysch belonged to multiple different scientific, cultural, aesthetic, and otherwise quirky trajectories (including currently fashionable discussion of visuality in the history of science) is also apparent if we contrast the high praise Ruysch received posthumously from such otherwise nationalistic  historians of medicine as Portal and Daremberg, his éloge by Fontenelle, or, most strikingly to us, the fact that after Newton’s death the Académie des Sciences in Paris decided to honor Ruysch by appointing him to Newton’s place (p. 422) with facts such as these: a 1690 inventory of his collection included “the skeleton of a human embryo of 4 months, holding in its left hand a bundle of lymph vessels, which I removed from a body more than 25 yrs ago, inflated and preserved in such a way that the valves are still clearly visible. What a lot of trouble beautiful things can be!” (59), or, much more disturbingly, the specimen, or tableau non vivant as the author puts it, of a hand holding a vulva, from Leiden University’s collection (reproduced on 284; some of these images are probably too macabre for most readers).

Sometimes, the disturbing is just strange, perhaps because we have only the story, rather than “the thing itself” (e.g., one item in his collection was described as “a small 4-footed animal that had been regurgitated by a 78-year old woman …enclosed in a pouch rather than membranes” [282]; the family wanted no money and there were credible witnesses to the event). However, the extent to which monstrosity can infect history (via the imagination) is surprising: Kooijmans notes that of the nearly one thousand specimens prepared by Ruysch, which were later bought by Peter the Great and shipped to St. Petersburg, only 11 actually display abnormalities. More conventionally beautiful are his daughter Rachel’s still-life paintings...

You can read this review in its entirety by clicking here; You can also come pay a visit the book at The Morbid Anatomy Library during open hours from 2-6 every Saturday, or buy a copy of your own by clicking here.

Image: The Anatomy Lesson of Frederik Ruysch (above) by Adriaan Backer (1670; in the Amsterdam Historical Museum); click on image to see larger, more detailed version.

"The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking," Oliver Burkeman, 2012

"... it pointed to an alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness, which entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death, In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions--or, at the every least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what 'happiness' really means."
--The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman

I am absolutely loving friend, Observatory presenter, and resident genius/Guardian writer Oliver Burkeman's new book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. A kind of 200 page confutation of the accepted wisdom of "positive thinking" and other truisms of the self-help movement, it is also a terrific and witty introduction to a multitude of exceptionally wise philosophies whose tenants run counter to those ideas, from The Stoics to Buddhism to Mexican Day of the Dead. The result is a book which provides a persuasive argument for reviving the notion of the memento mori--objects or artworks whose function is to urge the beholder to contemplate the fact that they, too, will die--and which takes the unpopular stand that to be truly happy, to live a good and full life, we need to embrace, or at least learn to tolerate, negativity, uncertainty, and death. Ideas that, obviously, I strongly share.

I highly recommend checking this book out for yourself; you can find out more--and order a copy--by clicking here.

Memento-mori themed painting found here.

A New and Perfect Book on Hysteria: "Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris," Asti Hustvedt, 2011

During the decade of the 1870s, three young women found themselves in the hysteria ward of the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris under the direction of the prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. All three — Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve — would become medical celebrities. The stories of their lives as patients on the ward are a strange amalgam of science and religion, medicine and the occult, hypnotism, love, and theater. The illness they suffered from was hysteria. This disease was not an arcane preoccupation of the doctors that treated them, but an affliction that would increasingly capture the public imagination. Stories about hysterical patients filled the columns of newspapers. They were transformed into fictional characters by novelists. Hysterics were photographed, sculpted, painted, and drawn. Every week, eager crowds arrived at the hospital to attend Charcot's demonstrations of hysterics acting out their hysterical symptoms. And it wasn't only medical students and physicians who came to view the shows, but artists, writers, actors, socialites, and the merely curious. Hysteria had become a fascinating and fashionable spectacle. But who were these hysterical women? Where did they come from? What role did they play in their own peculiar form of stardom? And what exactly were they suffering from?

... To what degree their disease was socially determined and to what degree it was physically determined is impossible to say. If they showed up at a hospital today, suffering from the same symptoms, they would probably be diagnosed with schizophrenia or conversion disorder or bipolar disorder. They would undoubtedly be diagnosed with eating disorders because they had bouts of willful starving and vomiting. However, if these women were alive today, they might not have become ill to begin with and no doubt would suffer from other symptoms.

I am convinced that Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve were neither frauds nor passive receptacles of a sham diagnosis. They really did "have" hysteria. Located on the problematic border between psychosomatic and somatic disorders, hysteria was a confusion of real and imagined illness. In an era without demons and before Freud's unconscious, hysteria fell into a theoretical vacuum...

Hysteria may be an illness of the past, but the medical and ideological notions of femininity that lie behind it offer insights into the illnesses of the present and the way they are perceived. And while modern medicine no longer talks about hysteria, it nonetheless continues to perpetuate the idea that the female body is far more vulnerable than its male counterpart... Why has my study of a disease that is no longer officially a medical diagnosis compelled me to collect information on these new disorders? Why do the lives of three women who lived more than a hundred years ago feel so relevant today and resonate so strongly with the lives of women who are my contemporaries?

--Excerpt from the introduction to Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Asti Hustvedt, 2011

I have long been on the lookout for a scholarly yet accessible book--in English!--that could answer my many questions about the 19th century phenomenon of hysteria as spectacularly manifested at Charcot's Salpêtrière Clinic (depicted in the painting above). Asti Hustvedt's newly-released Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris--the cover of which you see above--has proven to be just the book I have been waiting for.

Hustvedt--whose memorable essays on hysteria and popular culture you might remember from the Zone Decadent Reader--uses the stories of 3 of the great divas of the Salpêtrière stage as a framework to examine the history of Charcot and his clinic and to adeptly and compellingly tease out the taxonomically-troubling overlaps that make hysteria so fascinating. Her examination of these overlaps--which include science and art, mind and body, the clinic and the carnival, miracles and medicine, theatre and hospital, the mind and the body, the occult and the scientific--beautifully frame the central paradox of hysteria, its simultaneous realness and imaginariness, baffling to this "era without demons and before Freud's unconscious."

This book is sensitive, informative, nuanced, insightful, engaging (I read it in a day and a half!) and extremely thought provoking; it is well illustrated with many images from Iconographie Photographique De La Salpêtrière (as seen in photos above) and provides a wonderful discussion of the relationship between these photographs and the understanding of the condition. It also provides a persuasive examination of contemporary maladies carrying on the hysterical tradition in a variety of ways.

This book is, to my mind, the long awaited perfect book on hysteria. For those of you with an interest in the topic, I simply cannot recommend this book more passionately!

You can find out more--and purchase a copy for yourself!--by clicking here. You can also come pay it a visit at The Morbid Anatomy Library; more on that here. You can read an extended excerpt of the book on the NPR website by clicking here and can find out more about the Zone Books Decadent Reader by clicking here.

Images:

• Painting: Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière, 1887, André Brouillet's. Photograph: AKG Images/Erich Lessing. Found here.
• Photographs: From the book Iconographie Photographique De La Salpêtrière (1877-1880), sourced from Wikipedia Commons and The Waring Historical Library online exhibit Dr. John-Martin Charcot and the Theater of Medicine.

"Le Dernier Portrait," Morbid Anatomy Library Acquisition 1/26/10

The purpose of the exhibition is to evoke a practice of the past: portraying a deceased person, on their deathbed of in their coffin. This "last portrait" - death mask, painting, drawing or photograph - remained in the narrow circle of relatives and friends, but, in the case of famous personalities, it could be widely circulated in public. This practice, extremely common in Western countries in the nineteenth century and until the first half of the twentieth century, is today fast disappearing, or at least it remains strictly within the boundaries of the private sphere.

The exhibition gathers together pieces that are difficult to comment as they are linked to codes and rites now foreign to contemporary culture.

--The Musée d'Orsay website for the exhibition "Le Dernier Portrait"

The day before yesterday I visited the Burns Archive in New York for the first time. Stanley Burns' collection was really quite amazing, and I had a wonderful time viewing the incredible and impressive assemblage of photographs, books, and memorial artworks that surrounded him in his bustling brownstone home. I was also quite lucky to find that he had a few extra copies of a book I'd been coveting for sometime--Le Dernier Portrait, the catalog to an exhibition of the same name held at the Musée d'Orsay about 2 years ago--and was willing to sell me a copy for inclusion in the Morbid Anatomy Library.

The book, which translates to "The Last Portrait," explores the art and history of memorial and sickbed portraiture, touching on such portraiture in the fine arts, including examples by Munch, Gauguin, Seurat, Ensor, and Monet; 19th century memorial photography (featuring a selection of images from Burns' Collection, as featured in his incredible Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America); memorial tomb sculpture; news reportage; and the death mask.

This beautiful book now resides at the Morbid Anatomy Library; please feel free to come by and spend some time with it. You can find out more about the library by clicking here. For more on the Burns Archive, click here. For more on the book Le Dernier Portrait, click here. To find out more about the exhibition which inspired the book, click here.