Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
scientific and cultural information.
Take the section on suicides, for example. Here we
learn that in the 18th century the British were thought to
have a lax attitude to topping oneself. The French philosopher
Montesquieu argued that this was because of
the dismal climate and our predisposition to gloominess,
which in turn impaired the ability of the body machinery
to filter nervous juices. But trustees of Bristol’s Clifton
Suspension Bridge who fret over how to stop gloomy
Brits hurling themselves to a watery doom from Brunel’s
landmark should consider themselves lucky that we don’t
share the Japanese enthusiasm for copycat suicides. In
1933, a Japanese schoolgirl threw herself into the mouth
of a volcano on the island of Oshima. Over the next two
years, 1,208 people followed her. The authorities eventually
responded by building a small fence and banning the
sale of one-way tickets to the island.
The past, as we know, is a different country. And they
certainly did things differently when it came to death.
Mims describes the process of classical mummification
in all its colourful detail, beginning with the extraction
of the brain through the nostrils using a pair of pliers, but
also drolly reveals that economy class mummification
was available to the Ancient Egyptian lower orders. This
ignominious process consisted of pumping cedar oil into
the anus and then plugging the hole. Before refrigeration,
important folks dying overseas also presented a problem.
When the Bishop of Hereford perished in Italy in 1282,
BUY Cedric Mims books online from and
his body was chopped into pieces and boiled in vinegar
until the fat and flesh separated from the bones. The
squidgy bits and bony bits were then sealed in separate
leaden cases and shipped back to Blighty, where they
received a suitably reverent Westminster funeral.
Modern cultural differences are equally fascinating.
Islam dictates that the corpse must not be violated by
cremation or dissection, which presents something of
a dilemma for medical students in Muslim countries.
There is now a discreet but roaring trade in infidel stiffs,
which are shipped out to Saudi Arabia en masse. Those
peaceable Tibetan Buddhists have some interesting rituals
too. On a mountain near the Ganden monastery in
Llasa, a special bunch of holy folks called Body Breakers
are employed to chop up corpses to make them more
agreeable snacks for the local vulture population.
Only one subject seems to gross out Prof Mims and
that’s necrophilia, to which he devotes a single meagre
paragraph. But it’s those peculiar little factoids that
stay with you long after you’ve put down his entertaining
tome. Did you know that Lenin gets a week-long
bath and a new suit and tie every two years? Or that
the British police have seven sniffer dogs trained to
detect the gases of decomposition coming from bodies
underwater? Or – and this is my favourite – that a
company in Wales has just contributed to the sum of
human inventiveness by designing a camel cremator
for the Dubai government? �
341
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z