Death as entertainment at the Paris Morgue | Hacker News Reader

Death as entertainment at the Paris Morgue

atlasobscura.com

77 pointsIdealeZahlen17 comments

I wonder when the fascination for the dead left place to our modern sense of body sacredness. Is it our because of WW1 which killed so many young men and left many mutiled, or the Spanish flu afterwards, or because modern medicine taught us a thing or two about hygiene?

I think it never left. There are many occurences of corspes dissection for fun and profit: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/us/man-dissected-autopsy-...

If you want to dissect a corpse, all you need is $60 and five hours:

https://alok.github.io/2022/11/09/dissection/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33551036

I feel like instead of being about fascination for the dead it was more about absolute boredom due to the lack of entertainment that the life back then provided.

The proliferation of gory horror movies tends to prove the contrary.

I think there's a difference between watching through a screen what it known to be fiction and going to see with your own eyes the remains of a murdered child as described in the article.

Statistics show women read enormous amounts of crime and murder stories. Fascination for death has always existed in a way or another. What is rather new is the fact that we can identify to suffuring more quickly. We can "identify to it" more easily, and I do believe it is for the good.

Well one can still visit the catacombs to satisfy their morbid curiosity

https://www.outlookindia.com/outlooktraveller/explore/story/...

Here is a good visual introduction to the Paris Catacombs . https://youtu.be/la4roWgqriA

As for me as a Parisian I'll probably meet you there in a few decade. Ah ah !

Still alive today. Gunther von whatsisname's plastination and dissection traveling show fro example.

""4) Why do crows gather around their dead? Certainly one reason is that the death of a crow can offer a “teachable moment” that other crows use to learn that the place and responsible party is dangerous. You can read more about this behavior here.""

https://corvidresearch.blog/2015/09/26/why-crows-gather-arou...

So the "real dead bodies" side of the "why do people want to look at this stuff" internet has a history!

Wow, that's disrespectful.

It gives me a different perspective on the catacomb's ossuary, which is a very cool tourist attraction but at least not demeaning to a complete body.

At the exit, there is an honor system return bag for people to deposit bones they stole as souvenirs. If you could imagine your femur would be stolen by a future tourist.

I am a Parisian. In 1889, at the time the Berlin wall collapsed, as a 20 years your man,I had the chance to meet a cool guys who had the paper map of the "non official" catacombes. Fuck boy, let's go men !

We started at midnight after a few beers in a poor Paris area ( Denfert Rochereau). The entrance of the "unofficial katacombes" was an o small manhole next to an abandonned train track. We had to run into to avoid the "catacombes police". Once inside boy: kilometers of corridors, sometimes mostly dry, sometimes half floaded. I tell you water is cold. After 90 minutes of walk, we arrived at the "pinacle of the night". It was these bones cathédrales or corridors. We would walk into "à Quatre pâtes" on thousand of bones carefully packed. Terrifying but so exciting for a young guy like me. Fuck what a night ! We got out , with a tibia as a souvenir, my sister doing dentist studies at the time took back a full scull with many teeth, Wich apparently was necessary to practice at University.

All this to say that the Paris morgue entertainment show does surprise me but I can understand. Death was so commun, so 'normal'. Today we are also a bit extremist in a way. Perhaps

Until you time travel and fix 1889.. well done for your 140+ year lifetime

sorry. I meant 1989 of course

Bad opsec. All of us will receive a visit from the immortal cover squad now to fix our incorrect memories.

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