The Art of Sigrid Sara

See text via The Order of the Good Death. Here are some images to get you started on a fascinating journey:

The artist also has a crowdfunding campaign to create a series in New Orleans. $500 gets you a diseased hand, mouth, or eye! Donate more and you can get your own face immortalized in wax!

The Historical Body in Copenhagen

First the Medical Museion:

Reconstruction of the torso of Alexis St. Martin, who was observed for years by William Beaumont after a gunshot wound turned into a fistula with a direct view of the insides of the stomach.

Kidney stone 

Glass eyes

Former anatomical theater

Reconstructed apothecary

Preserved fetus in utero

Preserved head showing veins

Preserved foot showing tendons

Hand showing tendons

Forest of spines

Conjoined twins

Dissection table

Former anatomy theater

Spanish flies used as irritants

Cholera sample

Padded box for psychiatric patients

Prosthetic leg

Prosthetic arm

Surgical chair

And from the National Museum of Denmark:

For more On this miniature wax cadaver and much larger ivory skeleton See HERE.

In the Ivory Coast, dead birds were hung as a warning of smallpox

from HERE

Pythagoras, Beans, and Murder

From the never-ending and often satisfyingly strange vaults of Wikipedia:

"Some authors mentioned a "Pythagorean diet", the abstention from eating meat, beans, or fish. Firenze debated the Pythagorean diet in 1743.[22]
 Some stories of Pythagoras' murder revolve around his aversion to beans. According to legend, enemies of the Pythagoreans set fire to Pythagoras' house, sending the elderly man running toward a bean field, where he halted, declaring that he would rather die than enter the field – whereupon his pursuers slit his throat.[23] It has been suggested that the prohibition of beans was to avoid favism; susceptible people may develop hemolytic anemia as a result of eating beans, or even of walking through a field where bean plants are in flower.[24] It is more likely to have been for magico-religious reasons,[25] perhaps because beans obviously demonstrate the potential for life, perhaps because they resemble the kidneys and genitalia.[26] There was a belief that beans and human beings were created from the same material.[27]
 According to accounts from Diogenes Laertius, and or Eustathius, it is thought that the fava bean was particularly sacred to the Pythagoreans; this is because fava beans have hollow stems, and it was believed that souls of the deceased would travel through the ground, up the hollow stems, into the beans where they would reside.[28]
 Callimachus is quoted: Keep your hands from beans, a painful food: As Pythagoras enjoined, I too urge.And Empedocles, is quoted: Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans.[29]"

"for months [I] had been dealing with cadavers of all sexes and all ages - I could even eat my lunch sitting with the dead limbs." 

- W.S. Heckscher, art historian

from The Life and Work of W. S. Heckscher

HERE

1933 Viennese Autopsy Film

more HERE

Album covers, back from the dead

I've written before about the album art of Joy Division (including the sandpaper album cover meant to destroy other album covers)

Just as artist’s books are surviving in the underground, there are artists still pushing the boundaries of album art. These are some very cool examples: one set is permanently sealed within its sleeve and has remnants of the artist’s own blood.  Another has human ashes (as described on the sleeve) that are crushed and painted onto the playing surface of the record.

Talk about putting yourself into your music.

Pictures and info HERE

Sound HERE

Kostice, i.e. Sedlec Ossuary, i.e. The Bone Church of Kutná Hora