I just finished reading the The Ghost Map (featured in the last two morbid facts) and it is a very interesting book. It centers around the 1854 London cholera epidemic, and the investigator who was able to track down the source of the scourge as a well that had been tainted by cholera-infested sewage. This was a landmark discovery because the theory of the time (called miasma) held that disease was caused by polluted air, rather than germs. The discovery also led to improvements in sewage systems that resulted in a marked decrease in epidemics.

Although the book drags a bit in the last third, the first two-thirds are excellent. My favorite part is actually the first chapter, quoted for today’s Morbid Fact, which discusses the scavenger culture of mid 19th-century England. The depiction of the physical ravages of cholera itself (which will star in a soon-to-come Malady of the Month/Year/Decade entry) are also spellbinding, as are the disgusting details of the filth that city dwellers had to contend with back in those days (when “flushing the toilet” meant throwing the contents of your chamber pot out onto the sidewalk or alley). Above all, this book made me feel grateful to not have been born until we’d figured out modern sanitation systems! A recommended read!

Death’s Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales
By William Bass, Jon Jefferson

Elizabeth’s review:
“You probably already have this, but if not I can highly recommend it. Bill Bass explains the hows and whys of the creation of the Body Farm (yes – I WOULD like to go). One reason being his wife couldn’t use her kitchen after he’d been boiling body parts up on her stove! Mr Bass has a great sense of humour and is a great storyteller.”

Amazingly enough, I do NOT have this book in my collection yet, but I just put it in the ol’ wish list.

More Fascinating Forensic delights can be found at the Library Eclectica’s Forensic aisle.

Deadly Intent: Crime & Punishment: Photographs from the Burns Archive

Here’s the Amazon description:
“In the 1980s, the Burns Archive’s studies of derangement of the mind and body offered photographic histories of medicine and death. Deadly Intent: Crime & Punishment Photographs from the Burns Archive extends that study to crime. The book is divided into four sections: crime scenes, police action, punishment, and executions. It is concentrated between 1890 and1950, a time when criminals often admitted their crimes and were quickly punished. Until the late 1940s, the period from arrest to execution for a capital offense averaged 33 days. The change in police attitudes and of the punishment prescribed for criminal behavior is documented here in iconic photographs. Unlike many previous works on the subject, this compilation of crime scenes gives readers a forensic view, offering entire series of images used by detectives and criminologists. Other photographs reveal the evolving standards of the American criminal justice system, from water torture at Sing Sing prison, whipping posts, penitentiary life, and the notorious deadly work camps of the South, to executions: hanging, firing squads, and the electric chair. Only when all the evidence is presented can justice and humanity be properly served. This compilation of images, most published here for the first time, is a valuable new resource for historians and researchers.”

More ghastly delights can be found at The Library Eclectica’s Ghastly Gore aisle.

Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930
by John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson

From Publishers Weekly
“This is a startling window into the education of American doctors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries-on both a visceral level and for its revealing cultural record. Cringe-worthy shots of medical students-bare-handed gentlemen and a few ladies in street clothes show off their scalpels, saws and textbooks-while their cadavers, mostly poor and black, are awkwardly posed, and exposed. In one stunning shot, a black woman looks out from behind the young students. ‘What are we to make of an African-American woman, standing, broom handle in hand, behind the dissection table, her gaze fixed on the camera?’ the authors ask. More importantly, they conclude, the photo is now drawn ‘out of the shadows of history’ where ‘we can at least bear witness.’ A blood-soaked dissection table makes you want to look away and the dark humor of students playing pranks with skeletons are both hilarious and horrible. Postcards sent to family and friends must have caused shock and awe for postmen and recipient alike. Here, a difficult glance into medicine’s ‘uncomfortable past’ offers a grand opportunity to understand the legacy doctors and patients live with, and benefit from, today.”

Thanks to Nadja for the suggestion!

More ghastly books can be perused at the Library Eclectica’s Ghastly Gore aisle.

Gangs Of New York
by Herbert Ashbury

“And no, not the movie, which is okay. But the book by Herbert Ashbury, which I came across by way of The Gangs of the French Quarter. As a good New Orleanian, I have that book on my wishlist, and maybe Santa Claws will bring it. But I picked up New York at a library sale.

“I’m 35 pages into this book and have come across two passages that made me raise an eyebrow, and I gather it promises much, MUCH more. It’s very poorly cited, he just lists some papers and shit. Not MLA standard, but this was a book put out in 1927. Anyway, enough teasing, onto the two passages that made me sit down and email you.

“In talking about the Old Brewery in Five Points, which became a tenement:

‘Most of the cellar compartments were occupied by Negroes, many of whom had white wives. In these dens were born children who lived into their teens without seeing the sun or breathing fresh air, for it was dangerous for a resident of the Old Brewery to leave his niche as it was for an outsider to enter the building. In one basement room of about fifteen feet square, not ten years before the Civil War, twenty-six people lived in the most frightful misery and squalor. Once when a murder was committed in this chamber (a little girl who had been stabbed to death after she had been so foolish as to show a penny she had begged) the body lay in a corner for five days before it was finally buried in a shallow grave dug in the floor by the child’s mother. In an 1850 an investigation found that no person of the twenty-six had been outside of the room for more than a week, except to lie in wait at the doorway for a more fortunate denizen to pass along with food.’

“Later, the Old Brewery is being wrecked in order to make spiffy new Christian work houses by the Missionary Society:

‘The laborers who wrecked the Old Brewery carried out several sacks filled with human bones they had found between the walls in the cellars, and night after night gangsters thronged the ruin searching for the treasure which rumor had it was buried there.’

“They don’t say how big the sacks were. Slovenly reporting, obviously.

“Hopefully you’ll like this one. If I come across more horrible things I’ll send them on. Enjoy!”

More Horrifying History books can be perused at The Library Eclectica’s Horrifying History aisle.

“On a similar tip to the Car Crashes book, have you ever seen Negativland’s book/CD Deathsentences of the Polished & Structurally Weak? It’s one of my favorite things they’ve ever done, and, well, I just about adore almost everything they’ve ever done. The CD isn’t the thrust of the project — though it’s not bad, it’s not sample-based, and really noisy, so something different than you’d expect from them — the book is.

“The book is a collection of photos; they went to junk yards, and took photographs of car wrecks, then looked in the wrecks for detritus of their previous owners. The layout is the car on the left page of the spread, the item on the right, along with a transcription of what it says (as random people’s handwriting is often hard enough to read when it’s not on crumpled paper taken from old, wrecked cars). It’s REALLY cool — I highly recommend checking it out.”

Sounds like the kind of project I might dream up! Great stuff – and the website has a few samples. I just ordered a copy of it for myself. They are available for purchase from the website.

“It’s not really ‘morbid’ but sort of sad and interesting if you’re a ‘voyeur’ into people’s lives like I am.”

Oh, and you KNOW that I am a voyeur into people’s lives too… so this is a must-have!

The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic
by Darby Penney

Here’s the fascinating synopsis: “When New York’s 120-plus-year-old mental institution Willard State Hospital was closed down in 1995, New York Museum curator Craig Williams found a forgotten attic filled with suitcases belonging to former inmates. He informed Penney, co-editor of The Snail’s Pace Review and a leading advocate of patients rights, who recognized the opportunity to salvage the memory of these institutionalized lives. She invited Stastny, a psychiatrist and documentary filmmaker, to help her curate an exhibit on the find and write this book, which they dedicate to ‘the Willard suitcase owners, and to all others who have lived and died in mental institutions.’ What follows are profiles of 10 individual patients whose suitcase contents proved intriguing (there were 427 bags total), referencing their institutional record-including histories and session notes-as well as some on-the-ground research. A typical example is Ethel Smalls, who likely suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her husband’s abuse; misdiagnosed and institutionalized against her will, she lived at Willard until her death in 1973. While the individual stories are necessarily sketchy, the cumulative effect is a powerful indictment of healthcare for the mentally ill. 25 color and 63 b&w photographs.”

Available from The Library Eclectica astore and currently the paperback is only $10.17 too! I am snatching one for myself. More books about mental illness can be found at the Insanity! aisle of The Library Eclectica. (All proceeds from sales go towards keeping The Asylum Eclectica and the Morbid Fact Du Jour running.)

Perfume – The Story of a Murderer (2007)

“I came across this movie by accident, but really enjoyed it. Just thought to share.”

Product Description
Based on the bestselling novel, “Perfume” is a story of an obsession so overwhelming that it leads to murder. In 18th-century France lived Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), who was born with a phenomenal sense of smell. But as his gift becomes an obsession, he strives to create the most intoxicating perfume in the world by murdering young women to capture their essence.

More film recommendations can be found at The Library Eclectica’s Fearful Footage aisle.

“If you haven’t read them already, I recommend Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (multiple deaths on Everest, including a man freezing to death while he talks to his wife in New Zealand via satellite phone); also Into The Wild (young man seeks enlightenment in the wilderness, freezes and starves, skeleton found in sleeping bag). Also by Krakauer, the gruesome and blood-soaked Under the Banner of Heaven, all about Mormons, today and yesterday. Massacres! Blood atonement! Murdered mothers and babies! Heartwarming!”

I have personally read two of the books and can vouch for their excellence (the one I haven’t read, Into The Wild, is on my “to read” list). Here are my original reviews of them:

Into Thin Air
I picked this up at the San Francisco airport when I was sitting through a long-delayed wait for my brother and his family’s arrival, and I was absolutely annoyed when their plane landed and I had to put the book down. I’d never given much thought to Mt. Everest or the conditions that those who climb it must endure, but this book, about the doomed 1996 Everest expedition, had me hooked from the first page to the last. Of course, I wouldn’t necessarily take Krakauer’s word at face value (see Anatoli Boukreev’s book The Climb for an alternative perspective on the tragedy), but that doesn’t make his story any less compelling. Anyone want to join me in a climb of Everest to look at the bodies???

Under the Banner of Heaven
I’m ashamed to admit my naivety, but I never knew that Mormons could be so morbid! I mean, I’ve always thought of them as quite insane, but in a happy-happy-joy-joy wholesome Osmond holy underwear “no caffeine please” kind of way. But after reading this fascinating book, well, I’ve gained an entirely different perspective! Jon Krakauer exposes the grim truth behind Mormon fundamentalism, which (like most fundamentalist beliefs) basically amounts to a group of selfish men figuring out that when it comes to endulging in their darkest fantasies, there’s no better scapegoat than God.

You want to kill your brother’s wife?
“God told me to do it!”

You want to screw around with as many women as possible without guilt?
“God told me to do it!”

You want to slaughter people who don’t share your beliefs who happen to be passing through your territory?
“God told me to do it!”

You want to impregnate your 12-year-old daughter?
“God told me to do it!”

There’s literally NOTHING that you can’t get away with!

And sadder still are the women who have been indoctrinated into this cruel sub-culture which teaches little girls that obedience is the supreme virtue. This naturally results in brainwashed girls like Elizabeth Smart feeling that she must willingly submit to her kidnapper “husband” without any attempt to escape, and it makes a 12-year-old girl feel that she is “sinful” if she resists her father’s incestuous advances because God told him to do it. There are some truly sickening stories within these pages.

More than anything else, “Under the Banner of Heaven” is a compelling warning against the very real dangers of blind faith, regardless of what particular belief a person may ascribe too. A chilling read.

(These books and more can be found at my Amazon store, The Library Eclectica.)

In the Rogue Blood by James Carlos Blake

“About two brothers named Edward and John who run away from home in 1840’s-ish Florida, travel around and end up on opposite sides in the Mexican War. Incredibly graphic and violent, but once you start reading, it just pulls you in and you can’t put it down even when you want to. Amog many other things, you’ll meet a minister who’s fitted out his wife with a scold’s bridle, killers of every kind, the darkest underbelly of New Orleans, and you’ll see Edward lose his entire scalp and live to fight another day.”

More Fiction recommendations can be found at The Library Eclectica