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  2. Immaculate Corpses, The History of

Immaculate Corpses, The History of Medical Museums, Rogue Taxidermists, and A Congress for Curious Peoples: This Week’s Morbid Anatomy Presents at London’s Last Tuesday Society

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Tonight marks the beginning of the Morbid Anatomy residency at London's fantastic Last Tuesday Society; this week, join us for a Granta magazine medicine issue launch; an illustrated lecture by Rogue Taxidermist Robert Marbury and another by Hunterian Museum director Sam Alberti on the history of medical museums; a free, gin-drenched opening party for my exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy (from whence the above image); and a London-edition of "The Congress for Curious Peoples: a one-day symposium featuring a host of scholars, writers, and practitioners exploring in panels, illustrated lectures and discussion the intersections explored by the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy."

More on all events below; and please note: all events will take place at The Last Tuesday Society, 11 Mare Street, London, E8 4RP (map here). Hope to see you at one or more of these terrific events!

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Monday 3rd September 2012
Granta Magazine - Medicine Issue Launch: A Spoonful of Fiction: A Granta Salon
Doors at 6 pm, Show commences at 7 pm.

In this special edition of Liars’ League, actors from the live fiction salon perform stories of addiction, healing and the history of medicine by Rose Tremain and Suzanne Rivecca, as featured in Granta 120: Medicine. Then, writer and broadcaster Colin Grant (Bageye at the Wheel, I & I: Marley, Tosh and Wailer), in conversation with a Granta editor, tells how he pursued and then quit medical school and reads from his new autobiographical novel extracted in granta.com.

Admission price includes a copy of "Granta 120: Medicine and Hendrick's Gin and Tonic."
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Tuesday 4th September 2012
Robert Marbury - Rogue Taxidermy in the Digital Age
Doors at 6 pm, Talk commences at 7 pm

When Robert Marbury was 19 years old, he necked with Ricki Lake on camera. At age 29, he spent a year sailing in Indonesia, where he says his ship was attacked by pirates.Four years later, he was one of the three co-founders of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists.

Known as a vegan taxidermist, Robert Marbury documents the existence of little known wild and feral plush animals inhabiting our urban environments. With tongue firmly in cheek, through his Urban Beast Project, Marbury hopes to garner attention and general concern for the plight of such strange creatures. As he describes on his webpage: while most of the Urban Beasts exhibited on his site "have met the end of their species, it is our hope that with exposure and attention many other Beasts will be saved."

Tonight's talk will touch on image sharing, legal limitations, collecting, renewed interest in gaff and travel taxidermy as well as death and the impulse to make contact.

Robert Marbury is an artist from Baltimore Maryland. He is the Director and co-Founder of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists.
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Wednesday 5th September 2012
Dr Sam Alberti of The Hunterian Museum on the History of Medical Museums
Doors at 6 pm, Talk commences at 7 pm

In the first comprehensive study of nineteenth-century medical museums, Morbid Curiosities traces the afterlives of diseased body parts. It asks how they came to be in museums, what happened to them there, and who used them. This book is concerned with the macabre work of pathologists as they dismembered corpses and preserved them: transforming bodies into material culture. The fragmented body parts followed complex paths - harvested from hospital wards, given to one of many prestigious institutions, or dispersed at auction. Human remains acquired new meanings as they were exchanged and were then reintegrated into museums as physical maps of disease. On shelves curators juxtaposed organic remains with paintings, photographs, and models, and rendered them legible with extensive catalogues that were intended to standardize the museum experience. And yet visitors refused to be policed, responding equally with wonder and disgust. Morbid Curiosities is a history of the material culture of medical knowledge in the age of museums.

Sam Alberti is Director of Museums and Archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, which includes the renowned Hunterian Museum. He is interested in the past, present and future of medical and natural history collections. His books include Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum (2009), The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (2011) and Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011).
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Thursday 6th September 2012
Opening Reception for "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy" An exhibition of photographs by Joanna Ebenstein with waxworks by Eleanor Crook and Sigrid Sarda.
Free and open to the public
6-8 pm

In this exhibition, you will be introduced to tantalizing visions of death made beautiful, uncanny monuments to the human dream of life eternal. You will meet "Blessed Ismelda Lambertini," an adolescent who fell into a fatal swoon of overwhelming joy at the moment of her first communion with Jesus Christ, no
w commemorated in a chillingly beautiful wax effigy in a Bolognese church; The Slashed Beauty, swooning with a grace at once spiritual and worldly as she makes a solemn offering of her immaculate viscera; Saint Vittoria, with slashed neck and golden ringlets, her waxen form reliquary to her own powerful bones; and the magnificent and troubling Anatomical Venuses, rapturously ecstatic life-sized wax women reclining voluptuously on silk and velvet cushions, asleep in their crystal coffins, awaiting animation by inquisitive hands eager to dissect them into their dozens of demountable, exactingly anatomically correct, wax parts.

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Saturday 8th September
'Congress for Curious People' One-Day Seminar - London Edition
11am - 5:30 pm

A one day symposium featuring a host of scholars, writers, and practitioners exploring in panels, illustrated lectures and discussion the intersections explored by the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy." Themes discussed will include enchantment and enlightenment, or the sublimation of the magical into the rational world; the secret life of objects, or the non-rational allure of objects and the psychology of collecting; and beautiful death and incorruptible bodies, or the shared drive to immortalize the human body and aestheticize death in both medicine and Catholicism. 

11-12:Introduction by Moderator Joanna Ebenstein
Keynote panel: Enchantment and Enlightenment
(20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)
Moderated by Joanna Ebenstein
•        David L. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Modernity and the Sacred
•        Simon Werrrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History

12-1: Lunch

1-2:30 The Secret Life of Objects: The Allure of Objects and the Psychology of Collecting
(20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)
Moderated by Ross MacFarlane, Wellcome Library
•        Ross MacFarlane, The Wellcome Library
•        Petra Lange-Berndt, University College London
•        Kate Forde, The Wellcome Collection

2:30-3:00 break

3:00-5:30 Beautiful Death and Incorruptible Bodies: Eternal Life and aestheticized death in medicine and Catholicism
(15 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)
Moderated by John Troyer, Center for Death and Society, University of Bath
•        Eleanor Crook, Wax artist
•        John Troyer, Center for Death and Society, University of Bath
•        Gemma Angel, PhD Student ad UCL History of Art
•        Anna Maerker, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815
•        Simon Chaplin, Wellcome Library
•        Sigrid Sarda, Wax artist
•        William Edwards, The Gordon Museum

And onward and upward in the weeks to come:

You can find out more--and order tickets--for all events, click here.

Image: The "Venerina" or "little Venus," Anatomical Venus by Clemente Susini, 1782, Palazzo Poggi, Bologna; on view as part of the "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy"exhibition opening this Thursday. © Joanna Ebenstein, 2012

The piece is described on the museum website thusly: "The agony of a young woman is represented in her last instant of life as she abandons herself to death voluptuously and completely naked. The thorax and abdomen can be opened, allowing the various parts to be disassembled so as to simulate the act of anatomic dissection."

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  1. Anatomy
  2. Immaculate Corpses, The History of