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Following is a guest post by Ivan Cenzi of the Bizzarro Bazar blog, who has just published a new, heavily illustrated book on the astounding Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples, which some readers might remember from this recent Morbid Anatomy post . You can find out more about the book--and order a copy of your own-- here .You can also visit in the Morbid Anatomy Library where you will find a copy on our Death and Culture shelf! THE CALL OF ABANDONED SOULS The strange, unorthodox cult which developed in the Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples by Ivan Cenzi, Bizzarro Bazar The Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples is not just exceptional in its location (the remains of 40.000 human beings are stacked inside an ancient tuff quarry), but mainly because in this evocative underground cathedral a popular cult has developed over the ages: it's the cult of abandoned souls ( anime pezzentelle ). Anonymous souls, poor and deprived of the prayers and comfort of their loved ones, souls in need of the compassio...

This call for papers just in for an exciting looking conference on Art, Anatomy and Medicine to take place at Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina in April, 2016! Full call follows; deadline is July 15. Good luck, and hope to see you there! Call for Papers: Art, Anatomy, and Medicine since 1700 DEADLINE approaching (but extended to July 15)! Travel and lodging funds available for speakers!!  A two-day symposium sponsored by the University of South Carolina’s Provost’s Office and the School of Visual Art, in partnership with the Columbia Museum of Art To be held @ the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina, March 31-April 1, 2016 The symposium organizer seeks proposals for papers that address visual, theoretical, cultural, historical and/or contemporary connections, relationships, conflicts and/or collaborations among the visual arts, anatomy/dissection, and medicine from the eighteenth century to the present. Participants may be historians of art, medicine,...

My copy of Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775-1815 by Anna Maerker has gone missing from the @Morbid Anatomy Library. If anyone has a copy I could borrow for a few weeks, I would be most grateful! You can send an email to joanna [at] morbidanatomymuseum.org ! Thanks! Image: Anatomical Venus, Il Museo di Storia Naturale website

Due to the threat of thunderstorms, tonight's event at Greenwood Cemetery, Common Shade: Catherine Gallant on Isadora Duncan’s Dances of Mourning , has been rescheduled and will now take place next Tuesday, June 23 at 7:30 PM . Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience! Also: Morbid Anatomy is now seeking a new part time Retail/Visitor Services Associate. The job begins in early July and will be approximately 20 hours a week (Sundays, Mondays and Fridays) at $10 an hour. If you are interested, please send a resume and a brief paragraph describing your interest to erica [at] morbidanatomymuseum.org with "Retail Associate Application" in subject line. Responsibilities and qualifications follow. Responsibilities     Welcoming visitors to the museum     Ringing up sales and museum admissions     Tidying the space     Answering the phone     Side projects as directed by the office manager     Sales ...

Elizabeth Harper of the fabulous All t he S aints You Should Know blog has some astounding details to add to the material covered in our recent post on Sacred Italian Waxworks or The Last Judgement with Real Corpses in 18th and 19th Century Italy . She kindly agreed to write the following guest post which expands on the idea in surprising ways. All image credits listed below. Please click on images to see larger, more detailed version! Corpse Theatre, by Elizabeth Harper There’s a building that’s hard to overlook on via Giulia in Rome. It’s the one with laughing skulls over the door.  On a marble plaque at eye level, a winged skeleton holds a spent hourglass over a fresh cadaver. The plaque reads “Alms to the poor dead, which they get in the countryside.”   “They” is La Confraternita dell'Orazione e Morte, or the Confraternity of Prayer and Death. They were a group of Catholic laymen who buried Rome’s indigent dead and this building was their oratory. Burying the dead ...

Following is information about a new conference devoted to 19th century eccentric traveler, writer, naturalist and taxidermist Charles Waterton featuring friend of Morbid Anatomy Pat Morris . The conference will take place on July 31 and August 1. Full details follow. You can find out more here . Thanks to Petra Lange Berndt for bringing this to our attention! An Unconquerable Aversion to Piccadilly: Charles Waterton, Traveler, Taxidermist and Pioneer Conservationist Society for the History of Natural History conference and AGM Wakefield, West Yorkshire, Friday 31st July and Saturday 1 August 2015  The Annual General Meeting of the Society for the History of Natural History will be held in association with a one day conference of talks celebrating the life and work of Charles Waterton (1782-1865) and a second day with related excursions around Wakefield in West Yorkshire. The Wakefield Museum , at Wakefield One, is currently hosting an exhibition “ The extraordinary world of Char...

Doing research for my upcoming book on the Anatomical Venus , I came across the following choice tidbit in the excellent Waxing Eloquent: Italian Portraits in Wax (on which more here ). Italy, it explains, never developed a tradition of wax museums as we think of them; instead, it enjoyed a flowering of often macabre sacred waxworks located in confraternities devoted to caring for the dead. It continues: Despite Italy’s lack of wax museums,the country can claim a pre-eminent role ... of transferring the profane popular amusements of such displays to pious representations that, for more than a century, attracted the devout and curious alike. They were set up by the various confraternities devoted to burying the poor and bodies that had been abandoned in the countryside… The oldest was the archconfraternity of Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte … to enhance the solemnity of the octave of the dead in November, the association prepared musical oratorios, artistic biers and sacred represent...

Below, Filmmaker in Residence Ronni Thomas--director of The M idnight Archive --introduces the newest episode of his Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents film series . Entitled "Transmitting Thought : The Maimonides Dream Lab ," this s hort film introdu ces us to psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner's provocative e xplorations of telepath ic sensiti vity a nd th e dream state undertaken in 1960s Brooklyn. You can view the film above or by clicking here ; Stay tuned for more episodes which will premiere monthly on our new You Tube channel, which can be found here ! It is easy to subscribe to a set of rules when those rules are set by science rather than religion. But science lives with a bias -- that in order for an idea to be explored it must be observable, measurable and repeatable. Yet the irrational is part of our world, especially when it comes to the subject of human consciousness. Current scientific thinking brings an almost religious devotion to debunking anything ...

I found this wonderful ivory anatomical manikin imagination on the blog of the Special Collections, Archives, and Rare Books at the University of Missouri Libraries via the wonderful Tumblr account of Paula A. Ruiz, who kindly answered my recent call for imagery related to the Anatomical Venus . More on the piece, sourced from the blog, below;  you can read the whole piece, and see more images, by clicking here . ... This object is an ivory anatomical manikin that belongs to the collection of the J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library here at the University of Missouri. It is probably German, dates from the eighteenth century, and is about 11 inches long... Ivory manikins such as this one may have been used as educational tools by male doctors.  It’s not clear who was the intended audience for the objects. Were they used to demonstrate basic anatomy to medical students? Or laypeople? Or were they simply luxury objects, curiosities to be kept in a doctor’s study? Most of the i...

We have many wonderful events coming up at Morbid Anatomy!  First up , we have A Thief's Guide to Alchemy : Part 1, On the Language and Image or How to Read an Alchemical Text with alchemist Brian Cotnoir ( Wednesday, June 3rd ; ti ckets and more here ) . T he next even ing we'll be hosting the first it er ation of the Dilettanti Society Happy Hour Cocktails and Show and Tell in the Morbid Anatomy Library presented by Art in the Age . This week's guest will be Mi ke Zohn of TV' s Oddities , who will be pre se nting his collection of ancient and modern peni s e s ( Thursday, June 4th at 6:30 PM; t ickets and more here ) . Later that evening will be a presentation of Arcane Me dia in the form o f g l ass slides, m agic l antern p rojections, and a ntique t e chnologies ( Thursday, June 4th at 8:00 PM; t ickets and more here ) follow ed the ne xt night by Psychedelics and Death: A Brief Introduction with Psychotherapist Dr. Neal ( Friday, June 5th ;...