Presents a eclectic collection of essays on death and the intersection of anatomy and medicine, including pieces on such topics as post-mortem photography, books bound in human skin, eroticized anatomical wax models, and taxidermied humans.

On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world’s most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship. A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives—captivating and macabre in all the right ways—she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.

At head of title: Morbid Anatomy Museum.

Beneath the original Venetian glass and rosewood case at La Specola in Florence lies Clemente Susini's Anatomical Venus (c. 1790), a perfect object whose luxuriously bizarre existence challenges belief. It - or, better, she - was conceived of as a means to teach human anatomy without need for constant dissection, which was messy, ethically fraught and subject to quick decay. This life-sized wax woman is adorned with glass eyes and human hair and can be dismembered into dozens of parts revealing, at the final remove, a beatific foetus curled in her womb. Sister models soon appeared throughout Europe, where they not only instructed the specialist students, but also delighted the general public. Deftly crafted dissectable female wax models and slashed beauties of the world's anatomy museums and fairgrounds of the 18th and 19th centuries take centre stage in this disquieting volume. Since their creation in late 18th-century Florence, these wax women have seduced, intrigued and amazed. Today, they also confound, troubling the edges of our neat categorical divides: life and death, science and art, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, spectacle and education, kitsch and art. Incisive commentary and captivating imagery reveal the evolution of these enigmatic sculptures from wax effigy to fetish figure and the embodiment of the uncanny.

For centuries, humankind has sought to know itself through an understanding of the body, in sickness and in health, inside and out. This fascination left in its wake a rich body of artworks that demonstrate not only the facts of the human body, but also the ways in which our ideas about the body and its proper representation have changed over time. At times both beautiful and repulsive, illustrated anatomy continues to hold our interest today, and is frequently referenced in popular culture. Anatomica brings together some of the most striking, fascinating and bizarre artworks from the 16th through to the 20th century, exploring human anatomy in one beautiful volume.

An intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history, Ghostland takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted places--and deep into the dark side of our history.

The first day at college, my professor dropped dead. The second day, I assisted at his autopsy. Let's hope I don't have to go through four years of this...."When Jenna Blake starts her freshman year at Packard University, she's not only living on her own for the first time, she's moving closer to the father she never really knew. It's an exciting time, filled with new faces and new challenges, not to mention parties and guys and...corpses?Jenna feels torn about her future. She'd like to be a doctor like her mother, but she can't stand the sight of blood. Her father, a criminology professor, thinks he has the answer and sends her to interview for a job with the medical examiner -- an interview that takes place in the middle of an autopsy.When a congressional aide goes violently insane and then drops dead, the pathology team at Packard Medical Center discovers that his brain was ravaged with disease -- and loaded with insect larvae. As Jenna starts her new job, she is drawn into a web of terrifying disease, dangerous politics, and intriguing mystery. And when one of her professors ends up dead, she starts making connections even the police haven't seen...connections which will bring her face to face with a pair of killers: one medical, and one all too human.

Performing a surgical operation could be compared to na- gating inside the human body. Two essential requirements are necessary for a successful apprenticeship: ? A perfect understanding of the roadmap, the anatomy ? Regular training with expert surgeon teachers showing str- egies, tactics, manoeuvres, and gestures to make the journey safe, efficient and fast For decades this was the way taken by apprentice-surgeons and also by surgeons already in practice concerned about upd- ing their knowledge. For years their only travelling companions were books, drawings, and pictures. However, printed medium cannot satisfactorily and properly reproduce the movements of a manoeuvring surgeon. In open surgery, only the two first - sistants can precisely capture by direct vision what is happ- ing in the depth of the operating field. Therefore, the duration of apprenticeship is long and restricted to a small number of people per teacher. The introduction of movie cameras into the operating rooms improved the quality of surgical education. But filming in open surgery is not so easy. The cameraperson has to be well trained to catch good takes in the depth of a pit between the heads, shoulders, and fingers of the surgeon and assistants. Most of the time, those constraints disturb the op- ator’s manoeuvres, altering their pedagogical value. With the introduction of laparoscopic surgery (LS), using a video camera providing images in real time on a television screen, everything changed.

Three idiosyncratically macabre cabaret-restaurants in Monmartre, each with its own grotesque portrayal of the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven, and Nothingness. From 1892 until 1954, three cabaret-restaurants in the Montmartre district of Paris captivated tourists with their grotesque portrayals of death in the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven, and Nothingness. Each had specialized cuisines and morbid visual displays with flashes of nudity and shocking optical illusions. These cabarets were considered the most curious and widely featured amusements in the city. Entrepreneurs even hawked graphic postcards of their ironic spectacles and otherworldly interiors. Cabarets of Death documents the dinner shows, the character interactions with guests, and the theatrical goings-on in these unique establishments. Presenting original images and drawings from contemporary journals, postcards, tourist brochures, and menus, Mel Gordon leads a tour of these idiosyncratically macabre institutions, and grants us unique access to a form of popular spectacle now gone.