The Chick and the Dead

by Carla Valentine

  “Now we came out and once more saw the stars”

  * * *

  A viewing room containing someone’s loved one becomes sacred whether it’s called a Chapel of Rest or simply a facility, different from when it’s empty and an exhausted or depressed APT like me has slept in it. A church, whether a service is going on or not, is a place you don’t swear or mess about in. A human body, whether it’s gone through an accidental death or a natural one, deserves the same respect as its neighbour. Anything can be considered sacred if we think of it that way. Regardless of any religious leanings I had, that was not what I was at the convent for. It was there that I learned the meaning and value of ‘adoration’ and ‘contemplation’. It was there that I experienced my own symbolic death and realised how I actually wanted to live. It was there I was able to see the stars.

  Epilogue

  The Angel’s Share

  There is nothing more comforting than walking into my museum office on a Monday morning. After carrying my bags up a flight of stone steps it’s nice to take out my heavy, familiar key, unlock the door and enter my home away from home. After flipping up the blind and turning on the lights, I breathe a small sigh of satisfaction before hanging my coat up and surveying my surroundings. Keeping me company in the office are two severed plastic heads which medical students used to practise their resuscitation skills on. The heads have been decapitated, but despite this they both wear the expressions of satisfied ecstasy common to CPR dummies: half-closed eyes and demi-smiles concealing secrets only they know. In fact, all CPR dummies have the same face as they are modelled on one individual, L’Inconnue de la Seine – the unknown woman of the Seine. The woman in question, who was never identified, was assumed to have been a drowning victim. After she was found in the famous Paris river in the 1800s, her body was exhibited in the Paris Morgue. Her death mask, taken in plaster by a smitten pathologist, was popular as wall art in homes from 1900 onwards, a bit like those three flying ducks you’d see adorning walls in the 1970s, and was used to create the face of the Resusci Anne CPR doll in 1958, a tradition which still continues.

  Also in my office is the skeleton of a cat – a gift from a colleague – a chocolate spine and a whole shelf of blank-eyed human skulls waiting to be catalogued. Body parts of various styles, shapes and flavours surround me, so I’m not alone and I’m definitely not lonely. I have no office cohabitant enquiring about my weekend activities, which means there’s no need to admit my Murder, She Wrote marathon to anyone. When I go to grab the fresh coffee for my cafetière I know it will be in the fridge where I left it because there’s no one else here to drink it, and if I want to turn on the faux fire in the wooden fireplace I can do so without someone else complaining that they’re too warm. Having worked in freezing mortuaries for eight years I have a serious heat fetish and am thrilled to be in control of my own thermostat at last.

  The walls in the office may be a bizarre shade of salmon pink and the cupboards may be full of things I daren’t move because the twenty years’ worth of dust would give me an asthma attack, but this is a little paradise for me. I think Evelyn Waugh put it best in The Loved One when he said of his pet-cremating protagonist, Dennis, ‘There at the quiet limit of the world he experienced a tranquil joy.’ Working with the dead places me on the fringes of normal human experience, but it doesn’t have to be traumatic: my quiet limit of the world now involves the scent of coffee, the sound of forties and fifties music, and five thousand parts of deceased individuals who are quite literally resting in pieces.

  Bart’s Pathology Museum is not a mortuary, yet somehow my eight-year stretch on the front line of contemporary death led me here, to the sanctity of these four noble walls. St Bartholomew’s Hospital is the oldest in Europe to exist on the same site – it has been at West Smithfield, London, since 1123. The hospital was originally a monastery founded by a monk, Rahere, gradually expanding into a larger building with extra space for beds, a medical school, research facilities and more.

  It was here that William Harvey conducted his pioneering studies on the circulatory system in the seventeenth century. Here, too, Percivall Pott developed important principles of modern medicine in the eighteenth century, such as demonstrating that a certain cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen. And here, in the late nineteenth century, Ethel Bedford Fenwick created a nationally recognised certificate for nursing, advancing the profession in the process. As a result of the hospital’s rich history, every time building works are carried out reams and reams of skeletons are found buried deep in the ground, some of which are a thousand years old.

  Bart’s is also the place where Sherlock Holmes meets Dr Watson in the first of the Sherlock books. It’s even been said that Conan Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet in my very office. (Although I doubt the walls were salmon pink back then. Perhaps they were scarlet?) And now I am honoured to be a part of such an illustrious institution. As a lover of vintage fashion, old detective novels and anything antique I really don’t think I could have ended up anywhere more perfect.

  My first day at Bart’s was 31 October 2011, rather apt given it was Halloween and most people would consider a place such as this, with its anatomical specimens and skeleton-filled floor, to be quite spooky. Halloween was originally the festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-en), a pagan celebration during which we honoured our dead, and this museum is a place in which the dead are honoured. Personally, I don’t think the museum is any spookier than a church. In fact, like a church, the cavernous Victorian museum is a sacred space; a sanctuary. Rows upon rows of specimens, like pews of dignified worshippers, are embraced by three storeys’ worth of Victorian Portland stone, and are only just protected from the unpredictable British weather by a lantern ceiling of fragile glass. Six huge copper-shaded lights hang down from the crossbeams like censers, and the ‘pulpit’ at the front – the lectern – has been host to a slew of esteemed speakers who’ve regaled thousands of visitors with fascinating ‘sermons’. It is a cathedral built to protect the relics within and dedicated to sharing knowledge with its congregation – knowledge of the history, diagnosis and healing of disease.

  In the Pharsalia, an epic poem about the civil war in Rome written by Lucan in AD 61–65, much space is dedicated to the activities of the terrifying necromancer and witch Erictho. She was described as fearsome and disgusting, unkempt and haggard, with skin as pale as bone and hair as black as night. She was said to inhabit deserted tombs and to communicate with corpses; a woman so terrible that even the wolves and vultures fled from her. Yet her talents were unsurpassed when it came to raising the dead, so politicians and military men would seek her out for her divinatory powers, men such as the General Sextus Pompey, who was fighting Caesar’s formidable armies. In one elaborate passage, Erictho reanimates a fresh corpse to command it to divine the future. After a magical ritual of exhuming the corpse, opening its body cavity and filling it with a vile yet magical mixture,

  at once the congealed gore warmed up, soothed the black wounds and ran into the veins and the extremities of the limbs. As the blood struck them the organs beneath the chill breast quivered and life, creeping anew into the innards that had forgotten it, mingled itself with death.

  I don’t go around digging up corpses in an attempt to enter into discourse with them, despite my obvious enthusiasm for my job, but in some ways my role in the museum is the same. My aim is metaphorically to bring the dead back to life in order to hear their stories once more, or even interpret their prophecies of the future.

  Each day at Bart’s my process is similar to when I worked in mortuaries. As an APT I used to ‘read’ the flesh of the deceased by sight and touch, like words and Braille, to compose the story of the end of their lives. I read bruises, scars, tattoos and medical interventions on the parchment of the skin to help the pathologist describe the deceased’s last moments and determine cause of death. Here in the museum, like Erictho coaxing silent spirits of the dead back into their withered flesh, I try to build a
narrative of each individual, resurrect them from their medical origins and plunge them into that liminal space between history, public health, literature and art. Whether a year old or a hundred years old, everybody has a story.

  Before I was appointed as sole staff member, the museum had begun to fall into disrepair; for years it had only been in use by medical students and doctors. Initially, my main task was to go through all five thousand anatomical specimens and repair, clean or rearrange them depending on what was necessary. Because the Human Tissue Authority doesn’t govern human remains over a hundred years old I started by going through every single pot and checking their ID numbers and dates against my catalogues. If they were older than a hundred years I brought them down to the ground floor, meaning we’d eventually be able to allow the general public to see them – something that hadn’t happened in the museum’s history.

  The age of these specimens opened up a whole new world of pathological conditions we barely see any more, which made them so much more special and unique. Chimney Sweep’s Cancer of the scrotum, for example, affected the males in that particular vocation, as the name suggests. It is a sad fact that during the 1700s and 1800s young boys were forced to clean chimneys naked, and because the skin of the scrotum can be fairly wrinkly the soot would stick inside the crevices. Eventually, around when the boys hit puberty, a wart-like sore would form on their scrotums, which was often mistaken for something sexually transmitted. The sweeps used to use blades or sharp pieces of wood to try and ‘scrape off’ the wart. Their attempts were futile and eventually the wart would grow to cover a larger area of skin because it was, in fact, a carcinoma. This link was made by Bart’s own surgeon Percivall Pott – the first to connect a malignant disease with an occupation – in effect making him the person responsible for our Health and Safety at Work Acts. We have three examples of these scrotums in the collection and you can see every wrinkle and pubic hair. Even though they’re fragments, dissociated from the deceased, the narrative that accompanies the specimens in the pots makes them whole: they’re not objects, they’re subjects with colourful and lively tales; when you read about them and examine each mark upon the flesh, the human story comes through. To me, it feels like each specimen is a post-mortem from the past, and I’m still reading the histories of the individuals as I used to, although instead of them being sent to me from the local Coroner I’m digging them up from years gone by.

  We as a team began to put on events, and the museum’s reputation began to grow. It was recognised as a huge resource, an opportunity to create a space for unique engagement of the public with pathology as well as a hub of research. Suddenly, no two days were the same and I began to receive more unusual requests: a famous fashion designer wanted to do a photoshoot in the museum; artists wanted to display their work in the beautiful exhibition space; heavy rock bands wanted to do special acoustic music sets among the specimens. The museum, like myself, had been reborn.

  * * *

  The phone rang one morning as I was taking a sip of coffee and I answered: ‘Hello, Pathology Museum.’ (It had taken a long time for me to stop saying ‘Hello, Mortuary’.)

  The voice on the other end of the line was a woman from the press office and she could barely contain her excitement. ‘Oh my God, do you know who wants to come and visit?’ She didn’t even give me a chance to answer before she squealed, ‘Bradley Cooper!’

  I was silent for a minute before saying, ‘Hmm, OK.’ Famous Hollywood star and heart-throb Bradley Cooper? I mean, I guess I could fit him in, but there is a heart to be re-potted, a kidney that’s started leaking all over the second level, and I just found another uterus in one of the cupboards that I need to search out in the catalogue. Still, an hour showing off the specimens and a coffee with Bradley might be nice. All in a day’s work.

  Bibliography

  The First Cut

  Fisher, Pam, ‘Houses for the dead: the provision of mortuaries in London, 1843–1889’, The London Journal, 34 (2009), 1–15

  1. Information: ‘Media Most Foul’

  Dick, Philip K., ‘How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’ (1978)

  Lynch, Thomas, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, W. W. Norton and Company (1997)

  2. Preparation: ‘Grief Encounters’

  Churchill, Winston, on his 75th birthday in 1949

  3. Examination: ‘Judging a Book by its Cover’

  Neruda, Pablo, ‘Ode To A Naked Beauty/Beautiful Nude’

  Gale, Christopher P. and Mulley, Graham P, ‘Pacemaker explosions in crematoria: problems and possible solutions’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2002), 95(7): 353–355

  Phillips, A.W., Patel, A.D. and Donell, S. T., ‘Explosion of Fixion(R) humeral nail during cremation: Novel “complication” with a novel implant’, Injury Extra Volume 37, Issue 10 (2006), 357–358

  Roach, Mary, Stiff, W. W. Norton and Company (2003)

  Richardson, Ruth, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Routledge (1988)

  Davies, Rodney, Buried Alive, Robert Hale (2000)

  4. Difficult Examination: ‘Pulp Fiction’

  Goll, Iwan, (1891–1950) ‘Teenage Angst’: Placebo, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 1996. By Brian Molko, Stefan Olsdal and Robert Schultzberg

  Quigley, Christine,The Corpse: A History, McFarland and Co., (1996)

  5. Penetration: ‘Rose Cottage’

  Attar, Farid ud-Din, (c. 1145–c. 1221), The Conference of the Birds

  Shillace, Brandy, Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Can Tell Us About Life and Living, Elliott and Thompson, (2015)

  Nuland, Sherwin B., How We Die, Random House (1993) ‘When masturbation can be fatal: The practice of auto-erotic asphyxia is often concealed by a coroner’s verdict’, Monique Roffey, The Independent (1993) http://ind.pn/29wIbqB

  Bronfen, Elizabeth, Over Her Dead Body, Manchester University Press (1992)

  6. Thoracic Block: ‘Home Isn’t Where the Heart Is

  Autumn, Emilie, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, The Asylum Emporium (2009)

  Coronary Heart Disease Statistics: http://bit.ly/1VkqriW

  7. Abdominal Block: ‘Pickled Punks’

  ‘In Bloom’, Nirvana, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., BMG Rights Management US, LLC, 1991. By Kurt Cobain

  Ebenstein, Joanna, The Anatomical Venus, Distributed Art Publishers (2016)

  8. The Head: ‘Losing my Head’

  ‘Break the Night with Colour’: Richard Ashcroft, Kobalt Music Publishing, 2006. By Richard Ashcroft

  Collins, Kim A, ‘Postmortem Vitreous Analyses’, Medscape (2016) http://bit.ly/2mb8jfT

  Maning, Frederick Edward, Old New Zealand (1983)

  9. Fragmented Remains ‘Bitsa’

  ‘Bitsa’, BBC, 1992. By Peter Charlton

  ‘Genitals Stolen in Morgue’, Mervyn Naidoo, BBC, 7 June 2015 http://bit.ly/2mblLjQ

  ‘Decomposition Rats Between Humans, Pigs May Vary Wildly’, Seth Augenstein, Forensic Magazine, 5 March 2016 http://bit.ly/2lJnD2q

  ‘Body parts left over from operations should be used to help train police dogs’, Martin Evans, The Telegraph, 3 February 2016 http://bit.ly/1NPLShV

  10. Reconstruction: ‘All the King’s Men’

  Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Press (1988)

  Bones without Barriers: http://boneswithoutbarriers.org/

  ‘What You Need to Know About Skin Grafts and Donor Site Wounds’, Pauline Beldon, Wounds International http://bit.ly/2lJd5jS

  Chin, Gail, ‘The Gender of Buddhist Truth: The Female Corpse in a Group of Japanese Paintings’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol 25, No 3/4 (1998), 277–317 http://bit.ly/2moYFCi

  11. Chapel of Rest: ‘Sister Act’

  McCarthy, Jenny, Love, Lust & Faking It: The Naked Truth About Sex, Lies, and True Romance, HarperCollins Publishers (2010)

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly I have to give a huge thanks to my fantastic ag
ent Robyn Drury for recognising the potential in such a rough diamond and making it shine – that applies to me as well as the book – and to the whole team at Diane Banks Associates who have been incredibly supportive.

  Thanks also to the team at Little, Brown for believing in my story and helping it become a reality: they are the midwives to this ‘book birth’ and I couldn’t have done it without them guiding me every step of the way, telling me when I needed to ‘breathe’ and metaphorically wiping my brow. Special thanks go to my editor Rhiannon Smith who spurred me on with every possible encouraging gif of Midsomer Murders she could find because, yes, that’s the kind of encouragement I respond to. And thanks to Jack Smyth for the beautiful cover, which I’m very happy for this book to be judged by!

  Special thanks and all my love goes to my supportive and incredibly patient fiancé, Jonny Blyth, who is my rock. He was probably so tired of my repetitive refrain: ‘I can’t watch a film – I HAVE A BOOK TO WRITE!’ and ‘I can’t go to the barbecue – I HAVE A BOOK TO WRITE!’ but now the book is here and I’m sure he feels like a proud baby-daddy. He should, I couldn’t have done this without him.

  My family are used to me being a crazy nutter who takes on far too much at once, but this time I worried them half to death by writing a book at the same time as everything else I was working on. Thanks to my mum, Collette, and my brother, Ryan, for always being at the other end of the phone or at the station to pick me up when it all got a bit too much and I headed up North for lots of comforting carbs with gravy. And a proper brew.