Decidedly Grim

Today’s Bony Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On March 27, 1845, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, the future discoverer of the x-ray, was born in Germany.  In December 1895 – at the chronological bisection of his birth and the advent of atomic warfare – he stumbled upon the mysterious rays that would radically alter the landscape of science and art.  From the outset, Roentgens’ discovery, which revealed the body’s depths and interiorities, involved the photographic apparatus.  The sensational nature of his x-ray photographs linked the new phenomenon to the medium of photography in the public’s imagination.  He complained in private that for him “photography was the means to the end, but they [the press] made it the most important thing.”  Among Roentgen’s earliest photographic recordings of the x-ray is an image of his wife Berthe’s hand.  Clearly visible in the image are the outline of her hand, its skeletal elements, and the shape of her wedding ring (worn, as is customary in Germany, on the right hand), which appears as a solid mass.  Upon encountering the image of her body thus traversed, Berthe, according to Roentgen’s biographer Otto Glasser, “… could hardly believe that this bony hand was her own and shuddered at the thought that she was seeing her skeleton.  To Mrs. Roentgen, as to many others later, this experience gave a vague premonition of death.”

Culled from: Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata August 10, 1945

Facts

Today’s Underestimated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

As Prohibition moved toward reality – Wyoming had become the thirty-sixth state to ratify the amendment on January 16, 1919 – New York City toxicologist Alexander Gettler and his small staff returned to the idea that wood alcohol (a cheap alcohol that could be distilled out of discarded wood chips, sawdust, lumber scrap, and bits and pieces of dead plants) was about to increase in popularity. The Eighteenth Amendment, now that it had attained full ratification, was scheduled to go into effect in 1920. Already, though, the medical examiner’s office was charting a rise in alcohol poisoning, as New Yorkers hurried to find alternative supplies. By the late fall of 1919 more than sixty people in the city had died from drinking wood alcohol and another hundred had been blinded. The same pattern played out across the country: 70 wood alcohol deaths in the Connecticut Valley, 9 in Chicago, 15 in Cleveland, and 3 in Memphis; 12 cases of blindness in Denver; and so on. But the official reports underestimated the totals, NYC Medical Examiner Charles Norris warned. Many doctors still didn’t know how to detect a wood alcohol death – the chemical procedures were still incomplete.

Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook

Facts

Today’s Rash Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Anton von Webern, one of the most important composers of the 20th century, died in 1945 near Salzburg. He and his wife had gone to stay with one of their daughters and her husband, Benno Mattel. Mattel, who was mixed up in the black market, was visited by two American soldiers sent to incriminate and arrest him. During their business Webern stepped out into the unlit corridor in order to smoke a cigar. He bumped into one of the soldiers, who, imagining himself attacked, turned and shot him three times in the stomach.

Culled from: Death: A History Of Man’s Obsessions and Fears

Facts

Today’s Brutal Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

As part of the training of Japanese soldiers leading up to World War II, one of the components of “Japanese spirit” valued most by the military was brutality. War is cold and by definition makes killers of those who practice it. But no army in history so systematically instilled hatred in its troops as this version of the Imperial Japanese Army. Brutality and cruelty were the rule rather than the exception in the Japanese army. It was the last primitive infantry army of modern times. The new army recruit entered a violent asylum where he was pummeled, slapped, kicked, and beaten daily. Shinji Ito remembered his first swimming lesson: “A rope was tied around my body, and… I was thrown into the river from a boat. When I lost consciousness from swallowing too much water, I was pulled up. Once I caught my breath, I would be thrown back into the water. My uniform froze.”

Culled from: Fly Boys

Facts

Today’s Ruggedly Handsome Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Ruggedly handsome, 6’4” Jeff Chandler was only 42 years old when he died. The square-jawed hunk, with prematurely gray, curly hair and chiseled features, was the picture of health until he suffered a slipped disk which making Merrill’s Marauders (1961), a World War II combat movie. Simple corrective surgery was performed at a Culver City, California, hospital. The strapping patient should have been up and about in no time. Due to medical misadventure, however, he died.

After a string of minor movie roles throughout the 1940’s, Chandler was cast in the first of several Native American roles (as Cochise) in Broken Arrow (1950) starring Jimmy Stewart. Chandler was Oscar-nominated for his three-dimensional performance. As a Universal contract player, he plowed through several action pictures. Along the way, he developed a real screen magnetism and played opposite several smoldering leading ladies: Jane Russell (Foxfire, 1955), Jeanne Crain (The Tattered Dress, 1958), and Susan Hayward (Thunder in the Sun, 1959). Jeff even broke into the recording industry and signed a contract in 1954 with Decca Records, completing several singles and an album.

Chandler continued to turn out movies and went on location to the Philippines for Merrill’s Marauders in early 1961. When he returned to Los Angeles, he underwent surgery on May 13 for a slipped disk. Following the relatively uncomplicated operation, he suffered internal hemorrhages and infection. During an emergency seven-hour follow-up operation to repair a ruptured artery, he was given 55 pints of blood. He survived that and further surgery, but another hemorrhage and subsequent additional infections weakened him. He took a turn for the worse on Friday, June 16, and died the next afternoon of a generalized blood infection further complicated by pneumonia. This needless tragedy was the talk of Hollywood.

Culled from: The Hollywood Book Of Death

Facts

Today’s Photographic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In the American South in the early 20th century, photographs of lynchings and burnings of African-Americans were turned into popular picture postcards and trade cards made to commemorate the events. A Unitarian minister in New York, John H. Holmes, opened his mail one day to find a postcard depicting a crowd in Alabama posing for a photographer next to the body of a black man dangling by a rope. Responding to the minister’s recent condemnation of lynching, the person who sent the card wrote, “This is the way we do them down here. The last lynching has not been put on card yet. Will put you on our regular mailing list. Expect one a month on the average.”

Culled from: Without Sanctuary

Facts

Today’s Unimaginable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A minor scald is painful enough, but the agony of being totally immersed in boiling liquid is unimaginable. Yet this method of execution was employed for centuries in countries ranging from Europe to the Far East. Mercifully short-lived in England, as were its victims, at least three people met their deaths in this manner, all for the crime of poisoning, and doubtless there would have been many more had that type of murder been detectable in those early centuries. So the causes must have been obvious when a maidservant was found guilty of killing her husband ‘by means of toxic substances’, and she was boiled to death at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, in 1531. Eleven years later Margaret Davey or Dawes perished in the cauldron at Smithfield in London for poisoning the family for whom she worked.

Culled from: The Book Of Execution

Facts

Today’s Depopulating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In November, 1937, as the Japanese army advanced towards Nanking, China, Japanese veterans remember raiding tiny farm communities, where they clubbed or bayoneted everyone in sight. But small villages were not the only casualties; entire cities were razed to the ground. Consider the example of Suchow (now called Suzhou), a city on the east bank of Tai Hu Lake. One of the oldest cities of China, it was prized for its delicate silk embroidery, palaces, and temples. Its canals and ancient bridges had earned the city its Western nickname as “the Venice of China”. On November 19, on a morning of pouring rain, a Japanese advance guard marched through the gates of Suchow, wearing hoods that prevented Chinese sentries from recognizing them. Once inside, the Japanese murdered and plundered the city for days, burning down ancient landmarks and abducting thousands of Chinese women for sexual slavery. The invasion, according to the China Weekly Review, caused the population of the city to drop from 350,000 to less than 500.

Culled from: The Rape Of Nanking

Facts

Today’s Temporarily Inconvenient Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On Saturday April 5, 1902 Scotland met England for a football international at Ibrox in Glasgow. That was the 27th such meeting and the first with only professional players. Ibrox football ground had been put in order by Rangers Football Club in 1899 at a cost of about £20,000. The total crowd at the 1902 international was said to be just in excess of 68,000. The match had not been in progress for long when, shortly before 4 pm, as fans shifted and swayed to follow a charge along the flanks, part of the western terracing gave way. The part that collapsed was near to the top of the terracing. In the ensuing panic, people at the lower edge of the terracing moved out onto the surrounding track and then the playing pitch and this led to a temporary stoppage of the game, lasting about 20 minutes. There were 25 deaths as a result of the accident. The number of people injured was in excess of 500, although the precise total is uncertain. Later in 1902 the contractor who built the western terracing two years before the accident was prosecuted and acquitted.

Culled from: The Sports Historian

The strangest part of the story? Per John Marr’s “Murder Can Be Fun” zine (Issue #18), as soon as most of the dead and injured were removed, the action resumed, and the damaged section of the terrace even filled up again! As anthropologist Desmond Morris said in his discussion of this tragedy, “It takes more than death and disaster to put the Soccer Tribesman off his game.”

Facts

Today’s Testy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In Natal, South Africa, in March 1824, a hundred and fifty witch-finders ‘smelt out’ over three hundred tribesmen, declaring them all guilty of smearing the royal kraal, the palace, with blood. However, Shaka, the ruler, declared them all to be innocent, stating that he had smeared the kraal himself to test the powers of the diviners. He then sentenced all the witch-finders to be executed, and this was carried out, they being skewered or clubbed to death.

Culled from: The Book Of Execution

Ooooooooh!!! Shaka is sneaky!

Facts