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Stories

  • Article

Beating the bodysnatchers

When a rise in grave robbing called for strong measures, mortsafes became the unassailable solution. Allison C. Meier explores.

  • Article

How we bury our children

Following her baby daughter’s funeral, Wendy Pratt found that visiting the grave gave her a way to carry out physical acts of caring for her child. Here she considers how parents’ nurturing instincts live on after a child’s death.

  • Article

Why we no longer keep our dead at home

Today in the UK we rarely sit with, touch, or perhaps even see our loved ones after they’ve died. Past practices were very different and, Claire Cock-Starkey argues, were more helpful for those grieving.

  • Article

Getting under the skin

Before the invention of X-ray in 1895 there was really only one way to accurately study the human body, and that was to cut it open.

All stories (12)

Images

  • Coffin burial and grave goods. Cristhorpe Cliff and Tumuli.
  • Albert Isaiah Coffin. Mezzotint by H. B. Hall after Charpentier.
  • Albert Isaiah Coffin. Stipple engraving by H. B. Hall after Charpentier.
  • A botanic guide to health and the natural pathology of disease / [Albert Isaiah Coffin].
  • A small coffin, presumably the coffin of Elizabeth, second daughter of Charles II. Etching with engraving.
  • Medical botany : a course of lectures delivered at Sussex Hall, during 1850 / by A.I. Coffin.
  • The coffin of Princess Amelia. Coloured engraving.
  • Lord Nelson's ornamented coffin. Coloured aquatint, 1806.
  • A large man contemplating a child's coffin. Coloured etching.
  • A man carries a coffin on his back. Etching.
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Catalogue

All works (411)