Not exactly a replacement for seeing Body Worlds on exhibition, but pretty neat nonetheless!
“The exhibition at Auschwitz no longer fulfills its role, as it used to. More or less eight to 10 million people go to such exhibitions around the world today, they cry, they ask why people didn’t react more at the time, why there were so few righteous, then they go home, see genocide on television and don’t move a finger. They don’t ask why they are not righteous themselves.
To me the whole educational system regarding the Holocaust, which really got under way during the 1990s, served its purpose in terms of supplying facts and information. But there is another level of education, a level of awareness about the meaning of those facts. It’s not enough to cry. Empathy is noble, but it’s not enough.”
” —— PIOTR CYWINSKI, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, where officials are revising exhibitions to better educate visitors, numbers of which reached 1.3 million last year. “If we succeed we will show for the first time the whole array of human choices that people faced at Auschwitz.”
Quoted in “Auschwitz Shifts from Memorializing to Teaching,” by Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times (via tartantambourine)
The New York Academy of Medicine Library is pleased to announce a new online collection, “The Resurrectionists”, which provides hundreds of searchable page images from a unique collection of broadsides, ballads, pamphlets, prints, and more, concerning the notorious murderers William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare were brought to justice in 1832 for supplying suspiciously fresh cadavers to Doctor Robert Knox, an instructor at Edinburgh’s largest private anatomy school. Hare testified against his accomplice Burke, who was found guilty and sentenced to die on the gallows, his body publicly dissected.
All of the materials in this collection; newspaper articles, the transcript of the trial, ballads, block prints, chap books, pamphlets, broadsides and other unique materials (including a letter in Burke’s hand on the eve of his execution), were collected at the time of the trial, and were later bound into a single volume. The volume came to the Academy’s Rare Book Room in 1960, as part of an important collection of books bequeathed by Dr. Fenwick Beekman.
In 2007, the Academy Library received a digitisation grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), through the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program. This support allowed us to scan the entire contents of the volume and make its contents accessible via the CONTENTdm collection management software.
“The Resurrectionists” is a remarkable window into early 19th century scientific medicine, popular and scientific media, and popular culture. It comprises official government reports and learned phrenological analyses of Burke’s skull as well as cheap pamphlets and handbills informing all of Scotland about the “West Port Murders,” in language ranging from high legal prose to popular verse both pious and sensational. A brief overview of the scandalous events, written by Jaques Barzun for a previous publication of excerpts from the collection, has been added.
Special Issue of the Journal of Material Culture 15 (4): The substance of bones: the emotive materiality and affective presence of human remains, edited by Cara Krmpotich, Joost Fontein & John Harries.
H-Death is a scholarly discussion group that explores the multitude of historical issues surrounding the process and experience of dying and death. The H-Death discussion group will allow scholars to compare and contrast the processes and experiences of dying and death across time and space, including American, European and non-Western contexts.
ASDS promotes the study of death in the arts, humanities, social and allied sciences. To this end, the association will:
The Bones Collective is an international and interdisciplinary research network of anthropologists, archaeologists, artists and others who share an interest in human bones. They have hosted various events including a seminar series, workshop and conference panel, and numerous less formal conversations through which they have explored the affective presence and emotive materiality of human bones. They are keen to forge creative and constructive links with scholars elsewhere who share these interests and are working on related themes.
