Today’s Largely Intact Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Exiled emperor Napoleon Bonaparte died on May 5, 1821. The following day, doctors conducted an autopsy, which was reportedly witnessed by many people, including a priest named Ange Vignali. Though the body was said to be largely intact at the time of the undertaking, it seems the priest took home a souvenir. In 1916, Vignali’s heirs sold a collection of Napoleonic artifacts, including what they claim to be the emperor’s penis. While no one knows for sure if it really is Napoleon’s, uh, manhood, people have paid good money for the penis. Currently, it’s in the possession of an American urologist.
Culled from: Neatorama
Generously submitted by: Reno Dave
Facts
Today’s Plentiful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Real-life cowboys are remembered for bellying up to the bar, but many legendary figures, including Wild Bill Hickock and Kit Carson, preferred opium dens over saloons. During the Civil War, morphine was frequently more plentiful to the troops than food rations, such that veterans on both sides, an estimated 50,000 people, became opium addicts. In 1900 morphine addiction was considered such a serious social epidemic that a group called the Saint James Society offered free heroin in the mail to anyone wishing to kick morphine. By 1925 there were 200,000 heroin addicts in the U.S. Kit Carson died of a “ruptured artery in his throat,” a typical complication caused by smoking opium.
Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages
Damn, heroin for free in the mail???? Now I know why they called them the Good Old Days!
Facts
Today’s Contagious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The 1918 Influenza epidemic killed at least 20 million, and possibly more than 100 million, people worldwide but the true number can never be known. Many places that were bludgeoned by the flu did not keep mortality statistics, and even in countries such as the United States, efforts at tabulating flu deaths were complicated by the fact that there was no definitive test in those days to show that a person actually had the flu. But still, the low end of the mortality estimates is stunning. In comparison, AIDS had killed 11.7 million people through 1997. World War I was responsible for 9.2 million combat deaths and around 15 million total deaths. World War II for 15.9 million combat deaths. Historian Alfred W. Crosby remarks that whatever the exact number felled by the 1918 flu, one thing is indisputable: the virus “killed more humans than any other disease in a period of similar duration in the history of the world.”
Culled from: Flu : The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic
Facts
Today’s Bestial Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In November 1937, after their successful invasion of Shanghai, the Japanese launched a massive attack on Nanking, the newly established capital of the Republic of China. When the city fell on December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers began an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history. An estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of a “bestial machinery”. Tens of thousands of young men were rounded up and herded to the outer areas of the city, where they were mowed down by machine guns, used for bayonet practice, or soaked with gasoline and burned alive. For months the streets of the city were heaped with corpses and reeked with the stench of rotting human flesh. Years later experts at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East estimated that more than 260,000 noncombatants died at the hands of Japanese soldiers at Nanking in late 1937 and early 1938, though some experts have placed the figure at well over 350,000. The death toll of Nanking – one Chinese city alone – exceeds the number of civilian casualties of some European countries for the entire war. (Great Britain lost a total of 61,000 civilians, France lost 108,000, Belgium 101,000, and the Netherlands 242,000.)
Culled from: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
Facts
Today’s Seething Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Sometime in the mid-1950′s a young and inexperienced Scottish doctor called Murdoch was working as a locum junior surgeon in a hospital on a Shell oil field in Sarawak, Borneo. There were four doctors on the staff of the hospital looking after a workforce of 10,000 people, and they also offered a free service to the local people in the surrounding jungle. One afternoon a young man was brought in looking very sorry for himself. There were runnels of dried blood all over his face and his hand was firmly pressed to the top of his head as if he were holding on a hat. Murdoch sat the injured man down on a chair and asked him to put his hand down. When he complied, about half of his scalp fell forward over his face covering his eyes and nose. The inner surface of the scalp and the exposed part of his cranium were covered with a seething mass of maggots. Murdoch was taken aback, but he got the patient over to a sink, put a length of rubber tubing on the tap, and washed the wrigglers out. He was able to sew up the scalp and within a few days, the patient was discharged from the hospital.
As the man was leaving, a friend explained the cause of the injury. The friend had been giving the injured man a ride on the cross bar of his bicycle along a jungle path when they hit a bump. The patient had fallen off and struck his head on a large stone. The friend, assuming he had been killed, and aware that the fine for riding two to a bicycle was $5, had left him where he lay and said nothing. The large, bleeding scalp wound had, of course, attracted flies and he had lain there, unconscious, for three or four days, during which time the eggs had hatched.
Dr Murdoch later said, “Never before or since have I seen such remarkable wound healing. One thing is sure – I can certainly take no credit for the outcome. That, clearly, must go to the maggots.”
Culled from: Medical Curiosities : A Miscellany of Medical Oddities, Horrors and Humors
Facts
Today’s Petrified Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Dominican Republic health officials say they have removed the mummified remains of a fetus from the abdomen of a 59-year-old woman, who had no clue what was causing the sharp pain in her stomach for decades. Miladys Roman is the chief gynecologist at Luis Eduardo Aybar Hospital in Santo Domingo. She says the woman had carried the petrified fetus for at least 30 years. The Haitian woman told physicians she had long experienced pain but she never received adequate medical attention until she recently entered the public hospital with digestive complaints. Roman told reporters late Monday that the remains of the fetus weighed 3 pounds and 12 ounces
Culled from: WCVBTV.Com
Generously submitted by: Katchaya
I wonder if she got to keep it? What a fine curio that would be!
Facts
Today’s Frankensteinian Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Another great moment in the history of severed head research:
In 1879, a murderer-rapist-necrophiliac named Prunier was guillotined in France and five minutes later, the head was given to Dr. E. Decaisne and his two colleagues. One doctor poised his lips over Prunier’s ear and shouted “Prunier” over and over but neither the eyes nor any part of the face showed any awareness. They tried pinching him, giving him ammonia smelling salts, put a candle flame near his eyeball. All negative, that is, until the experimenters tried jolting body parts with electricity. With Frankensteinian aplomb, they were able to make the eyelids flutter, teeth chatter. Taking the trunk, they were able to make his legs and arms move. “The [dead man's] fingers came to lock very firmly onto the hand of one of the researchers,” wrote Dr. Decaisne in the Bulletin de l’académie de medicin. “These muscular reactions persisted an hour and a half after decapitation, that is to say, at a time when other victims have been given over to the grave-diggers.”
Culled from: An Underground Education
Facts
You know what they say about Asian drivers, right? Well, now we have visual evidence: a compilation of crashes caused by ridiculously reckless driving in a Chinese intersection. It’s a wonder that anyone survives at all!
Sesame Shoot-Off
Thanks to Pablo for the link.
Ghastly!
Stumbled upon an excellent site today, chock full of amazing morbid trinkets! Dr. Morose and Miss Macabre are splendid artists and archivists of ghastly things. Their website is well worth a gander, as is their Etsy shop. Dark original paintings, obituary shadow boxes, poison bottles, macabre dolls, etc. – it’s a morbid trinket haven!
Dr. Morose & Miss Macabre’s House Of Oddities
Morose & Macabre’s Wicked Little Shop
Art, Trinkets