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Comment by lgeorget | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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 !

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.

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

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