The Punished Suicide

This article originally appeared on Death & The Maiden, a website exploring the relationship between women and death.

Padova, Italy. 1863.

One ash-grey morning, a young girl jumped into the muddy waters of the river which ran just behind the city hospital. We do not know her name, only that she worked as a seamstress, that she was 18 years old, and that her act of suicide was in all probability provoked by “amorous delusion”.
A sad yet rather unremarkable event, one that history could have well forgotten – hadn’t it happened, so to speak, in the right place and time.

The city of Padova was home to one of the oldest Universities in history, and it was also recognized as the cradle of anatomy. Among others, the great Vesalius, Morgagni and Fallopius had taught medicine there; in 1595 Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente had the first stable anatomical theater built inside the University’s main building, Palazzo del Bo.
In 1863, the chair of Anatomical Pathology at the University was occupied by Lodovico Brunetti (1813-1899) who, like many anatomists of his time, had come up with his own process for preserving anatomical specimens: tannization. His method consisted in drying the specimens and injecting them with tannic acid; it was a long and difficult procedure (and as such it would not go on to have much fortune) but nonetheless gave astounding results in terms of quality. I have had the opportunity of feeling the consistency of some of his preparations, and still today they maintain the natural dimensions, elasticity and softness of the original tissues.
But back to our story.

When Brunetti heard about the young girl’s suicide, he asked her body be brought to him, so he could carry out his experiments.
First he made a plaster cast of the her face and upper bust. Then he peeled away all of the skin from her head and neck, being especially careful as to preserve the girl’s beautiful golden hair. He then proceeded to treat the skin, scouring it with sulfuric ether and fixing it with his own tannic acid formula. Once the skin was saved from putrefaction, he laid it out over the plaster cast reproducing the girl’s features, then added glass eyes and plaster ears to his creation.

But something was wrong.
The anatomist noticed that in several places the skin was lacerated. Those were the gashes left by the hooks men had used to drag the body out of the water, unto the banks of the river.
Brunetti, who in all evidence must have been a perfectionist, came up with a clever idea to disguise those marks.

He placed some wooden branches beside her chest, then entwined them with tannised snakes, carefully mounting the reptiles as if they were devouring the girl’s face. He poured some red candle wax to serve as blood spurts, and there it was: a perfect allegory of the punishment reserved in Hell to those who committed the mortal sin of  suicide.

He called his piece The Punished Suicide.

Now, if this was all, Brunetti would look like some kind of psychopath, and his work would just be unacceptable and horrifying, from any kind of ethical perspective.
But the story doesn’t end here.
After completing this masterpiece, the first thing Brunetti did was showing it to the girl’s parents.
And this is where things take a really weird turn.
Because the dead girl’s parents, instead of being dismayed and horrified, actually praised him for the precision shown in reproducing their daughter’s features.
So perfectly did I preserve her physiognomy – Brunetti proudly noted, – that those who saw her did easily recognize her”.

But wait, there’s more.
Four years later, the Universal Exposition was opening in Paris, and Brunetti asked the University to grant him funds to take the Punished Suicide to France. You would expect some kind of embarrassment on the part of the university, instead they happily financed his trip to Paris.
At the Exposition, thousands of spectators swarmed in from all around the world to see the latest innovations in technology and science, and saw the Punished Suicide. What would you think happened to Brunetti then? Was he hit by scandal, was his work despised and criticized?
Not at all. He won the Grand Prix in the Arts and Professions.

If you feel kind of dizzy by now, well, you probably should.
Looking at this puzzling story, we are left with only two options: either everybody in the whole world, including Brunetti, was blatantly insane; or there must exist some kind of variance in perception between our views on mortality and those held by people at the time.
It always strikes me how one does not need to go very far back in time to feel this kind of vertigo: all this happened less than 150 years ago, yet we cannot even begin to understand what our great-great-grandfathers were thinking.
Of course, anthropologists tell us that the cultural removal of death and the medicalization of dead bodies are relatively recent processes, which started around the turn of the last century. But it’s not until we are faced with a difficult “object” like this, that we truly grasp the abysmal distance separating us from our ancestors, the intensity of this shift in sensibility.
The Punished Suicide is, in this regard, a complex and wonderful reminder of how society’s boundaries and taboos may vary over a short period of time.
A perfect example of intersection between art (whether or not it encounters our modern taste), anatomy (it was meant to illustrate a preserving method) and the sacred (as an allegory of the Afterlife), it is one of the most challenging displays still visible in the ‘Morgagni’ Museum of Anatomical Pathology in Padova.

This nameless young girl’s face, forever fixed in tormented agony inside her glass case, cannot help but elicit a strong emotional response. It presents us with many essential questions on our past, on our own relationship with death, on how we intend to treat our dead in the future, on the ethics of displaying human remains in Museums, and so on.
On the account of all these rich and fruitful dilemmas, I like to think her death was at least not entirely in vain.

The “Morgagni” Museum of Pathology in Padova is the focus of the latest entry in the Bizzarro Bazar Collection, His Anatomical Majesty. Photography by Carlo Vannini. The story of the ‘Punished Suicide’ was unearthed by F. Zampieri, A. Zanatta and M. Rippa Bonati on Physis, XLVIII(1-2):297-338, 2012.

Il mercato dei feticci

Lomé, capitale del Togo, ospita uno dei mercati più particolari al mondo: si chiama Akodessewa, ed è conosciuto anche come “il mercato dei feticci”.

Il mercato è una specie di “farmacia” tradizionale, dove i guaritori e gli sciamani del luogo possono trovare tutto quello che serve per le loro pozioni voodoo. Stiamo parlando del voodoo originario, sviluppatosi nell’Africa occidentale ben prima che gli schiavi lo trapiantassero anche in America.

Mentre vi aggirate per i banchetti, vedrete in esposizione decine e decine di teste essiccate di coccodrilli, cani, gatti, scimmie… ma anche camaleonti, cobra, pesci palla… civette, avvoltoi, pappagalli e altri uccelli, corna di antilope o cervo, e addirittura qualche rarissimo “pezzo” di elefante o leopardo.

Secondo la ricetta tradizionale, le teste vengono macinate assieme alle erbe medicinali e poste sul fuoco finché il tutto non si riduce a una polvere nera. Dopo aver tagliato per tre volte il petto o la schiena della persona malata, il guaritore sparge la polvere curativa sulla pelle e la spinge all’interno delle ferite.

Ci sono rimedi per tutti i tipi di problemi: coppie che non riescono ad avere un figlio, vecchi con problemi alle articolazioni, donne possedute dai demoni, sportivi e atleti che cercano una “marcia in più”. Triturando insieme una mano di scimpanzé e una di gorilla, ad esempio, si ottiene una polvere che garantisce ai portieri di calcio una presa di ferro. Se si vuole correre una maratona, invece, è consigliabile utilizzare testa, cuore e gambe di un cavallo: la sua potenza, resistenza e velocità passeranno, per mezzo di uno scrupoloso rituale, al corpo dell’atleta. Le ossa più grandi, invece, sono perfette per difendere la propria casa dai demoni e dalla cattiva sorte. Ogni anno gli sciamani girano di villaggio in villaggio preparando questi feticci di protezione.

La medicina tradizionale non si impara da un giorno all’altro. È una conoscenza che si tramanda di padre in figlio, e ci vogliono dagli 8 ai 10 anni di studio ed esperienza per poter dominare tutti i segreti di questa arte.

Quello di Akodessewa è forse il mercato di feticci più grande del mondo. Le parti di animali provengono da tutta l’Africa occidentale, Ghana, Costa d’Avorio, Burkina Faso e Nigeria. A sentire i venditori, il governo del Togo ne è perfettamente a conoscenza e controlla accuratamente questo macabro commercio. “Non uccidiamo nessun animale con le nostre mani, è tutto regolare”, si premurano di far sapere, anche se più di qualche dubbio resta.

Questa strana farmacia voodoo, ormai famosa, attira non soltanto africani di tutte le regioni, ma anche turisti. “Ai turisti vendiamo quelle piccole statuine là”, dicono con un bel sorriso i commercianti, semisepolti fra teste in decomposizione, code appese che sventolano e ossa impolverate. In fondo, sono lì soltanto per aiutare chiunque abbia bisogno di loro.

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Tutte le splendide fotografie presenti nell’articolo sono state realizzate da Grete Howard, che ci ha gentilmente concesso in esclusiva l’autorizzazione a pubblicarle.