Typhoid Mary

 this is an illustration that appeared in The New York American (1909, 20 of June)

Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 – November 11, 1938), better known as Typhoid Mary, was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen associated with typhoid fever. She was presumed to have infected some 50 people, three of whom died, over the course of her career as a cook. She was forcibly isolated twice by public health authorities and died after a total of nearly three decades in isolation.

Exactly how many people were infected or killed by her is not known. She refused to cooperate with health authorities, withheld information about her past, and used different pseudonyms when she changed cities. Three deaths have been definitively attributed to her, with estimates running as high as 50. Mallon was the first healthy typhoid carrier to be identified by medical science, and there was no policy providing guidelines for handling the situation. Some difficulties surrounding her case stemmed from Mallon's vehement denial of her possible role, as she refused to acknowledge any connection between her working as a cook and the typhoid cases. Mallon maintained that she was perfectly healthy, had never had typhoid fever, and could not be the source. Public-health authorities determined that permanent quarantine was the only way to prevent Mallon from causing significant future typhoid outbreaks.

A historical poster warning against acting like Typhoid Mary

Today, Typhoid Mary is a generic term for anyone who, knowingly or not, spreads something undesirable. In August 2013, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine announced they were making breakthroughs in understanding the exact science behind asymptomatic carriers such as Mary. The bacteria that causes typhoid may hide in macrophages, a type of immune cell.

Individuals can develop typhoid fever after ingesting food or water contaminated during handling by a human carrier. The human carrier may be a healthy person who has survived a previous episode of typhoid fever yet who continues to shed the associated bacteria, Salmonella typhi, in feces and urine. Washing hands with soap before touching or preparing food, washing dishes and utensils with soap and water, and only eating cooked food are all ways to reduce the risk of typhoid infection.

Read all her story in wikipedia

Ivo Saliger (1894-1987) "Der Arzt" and his memento mori works

Ivo Saliger (1894-1987) was an Austrian artist, known both for his original etchings and paintings. Der Arzt are two emotionally powerful, allegoric depictions of the physician's epic struggle to save human life. Der Arzt features a surgeon fending off death, which has in it's grasp a patient. A real life drama involving the artist's sister, provided the inspiration for this work. The tale told in a letter from Saliger to a student at Case Western Reserve University. The student, Mrs.Killpack, had written to Saliger asking him about the motivation that lay behind Der Arzt:

Now to the spirit and the meaning of this picture. It developed out of my mourning. I had a sister. At the close at 1918, as World War I was ending, she got sick. That is to say, the illness, which was perhaps already there, broke out - Lymphogranalomatosis. Several physicians of great stature made an effort to stem her suffering, but we knew it was hopeless. She was 22 years old at this time. I brought my sister to Switzerland, because of the quality of care there. A famous surgeon, the leader of the Zuricher Cantonshospital, endeavored to help my sister. I had known him in Vienna and I was living in his home in Zurich at this time, as a houseguest. Apart from the case of my sister, as a guest, I often listened to my host and his wife discuss other cases at the hospital. There they endeavored to help patients with a succession of diagnostic tests, to delay the inevitable end. Now an inspiration came to me. I went to my comfortable guestroom and made the first full-size preliminary sketch for the picture. A female figure, barely alive, clinging to the physician, who is attempting to fend off Death, who in turn threatening the patient's life. Perhaps intuitively, I portrayed the face of the physician with a skepticism, an uncertainty, whether the fight will end well or not. Well, to conclude - the physician's eternal fight with Death, is to save human lives. My sister died in April 1920. Cause: Leukemia. At the end of June 1920, after 2 months work, my etching stood complete. This is the real story behind this etching. (SOURCE)

Probably the next image is also related to his sister fatal illness and his strong faith to modern Medicine:

Print showing a physician using x-rays to repel Death, personified as a skeleton wearing a shroud, as it approaches a young woman on an operating table.

Next imeges are of memento mori subject:

Sleep paralysis in art as demonic visitation

Nikolaj Abraham Abildgaard, Nightmare (1800)

Sleep paralysis is a phenomenon in which people who are either falling asleep or awakening from sleep temporarily experience a sense of inability to move. More formally, it is a transition state between wakefulness and rest characterized by complete muscle atonia (muscle weakness).

Henry Fuseli, the Nightmare (1781)

Henry Fuseli, the Nightmare (1790–91)

Henry Fuseli, The Incubus Leaving Two Sleeping Women (1793)

Hallucinations are symptoms commonly experienced during episodes of sleep paralysis. There are some main types of these hallucinations that can be linked to pathologic neurophysiology. These include the belief that there is an intruder in the room, the incubus, and vestibular motor sensations. Many people that experience sleep paralysis are struck with a deep sense of terror because they sense a menacing presence in the room while they are paralyzed which will hereafter be referred to as the intruder.

Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin (1809 – 1864)

unknown artist and date

Sensing a malignant presence in the room during an episode of sleep paralysis is believed to be the result of a hyper vigilant state that is created in the midbrain. More specifically it is believed that the emergency response is activated in the brain when individuals wake up paralyzed and feel extremely vulnerable to attack. This feeling of helplessness can intensify the effects of the threat response well above the level typically found in normal dreams; this could explain why the hallucinations experienced during sleep paralysis are so vivid.

Jean Pierre Simon, The Nightmare (1810)

Normally the threat activated vigilance system is a protective mechanism used by the body to differentiate between dangerous situations and to determine whether the fear response is appropriate. This threat vigilance system is evolutionarily biased to interpret ambiguous stimuli as dangerous because the survival of the organism is greatly increased if it is more likely to interpret situations as life-threatening. This could serve as an explanation as to why the presence sensed by those experiencing sleep paralysis is generally believed to be evil.

Eugène Thivier, The Nightmare (1894)

The incubus hallucination is associated with the belief by the individual experiencing sleep paralysis that an intruder is attempting to suffocate them, usually by means of strangulation. It is believed that the incubus hallucination is a combination of the threat vigilance activation system and the muscle paralysis associated with sleep paralysis that removes voluntary control of breathing.

Fritz Schwimbeck , The Nightmare (1915)

Vincenz Georg Kininger - The Dream of Eleanor (1795)

The original definition of sleep paralysis was codified by Samuel Johnson as "nightmare", a term that evolved into our modern definition. Sleep paralysis was widely considered to be the work of demons and more specifically incubi, which were thought to sit on the chests of sleepers. In Old English the name for these beings was mare or mære, hence comes the mare part in nightmare.

Ferdinand Hodler (1853 - 1918)

In Finnish and Swedish folklore, sleep paralysis is caused by a mare, a supernatural creature related to incubi and succubi. The mare is a damned woman, who is cursed and her body is carried mysteriously during sleep and without her noticing. In this state, she visits villagers to sit on their rib cages while they are asleep, causing them to experience nightmares.

wood engraving from J Cazotte's 1845 book, Le Diable Amoureux, entitled "The Nightmare"

Folk belief in Newfoundland, South Carolina and Georgia describe the negative figure of the hag who leaves her physical body at night, and sits on the chest of her victim. The victim usually wakes with a feeling of terror, has difficulty breathing because of a perceived heavy invisible weight on his or her chest, and is unable to move i.e., experiences sleep paralysis.

Olaf Gulbransson (1873 – 1958) 

Warren Criswell , Incubus

In Turkey, sleep paralysis is called karabasan, and is similar to other stories of demonic visitation during sleep. A demon, comes to the victim's room, holds him or her down hard enough not to allow any kind of movement, and starts to strangle the person. To get rid of the demonic creature, one needs to pray to Allah with certain lines from the Qur'an.

Dennis Culver

Andy Paciorek

Andy Paciorek

Sally Mann photography- Body Farm

Sally Mann is an American photographer, best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death. Mann’s fifth book, "What Remains", published in 2003, is based on the show of the same name at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, DC and is in five parts. The first section contains photographs of the remains of Eva, her greyhound, after decomposition. The second part has the photographs of dead and decomposing bodies at a federal Forensic Anthropology Facility (known as the ‘body farm’). The third part details the site on her property where an armed escaped convict was killed. The fourth part is a study of the grounds of Antietam, the site of the bloodiest single day battle in American history during the Civil War. The last part is a study of close-ups of the faces of her children. Thus, this study of mortality, decay and death ends with hope and love.

Mann has a gift for provoking strong reactions ("I like pushing buttons") and her pictures of rotting corpses certainly do that. She took them at the University of Tennessee's anthropological facility at Knoxville, aka the "body farm", where human decomposition is studied scientifically. The bodies are mostly left in an outdoor setting and lie there for months or even years. In Steven Cantor's 2006 television documentary about Mann, she is observed happily wandering from cadaver to cadaver, prodding this body part and stroking that one, unfazed by the maggots and reek of decay. (wikipedia)

"Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive," she says. "I couldn't wait to get there. The smell didn't bother me. And you should see the colours – they're really beautiful. As Wallace Stevens says, death is the mother of beauty." (the guardian)Visit her SITE for more of her work.

A body farm is a research facility where human decomposition can be studied in a variety of settings. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the decomposition process, permitting the development of techniques for extracting information (such as the timing and circumstances of death) from human remains. Body farm research is particularly important within forensic anthropology and related disciplines, and has applications in the fields of law enforcement and forensic science. Five such facilities exist in the United States, with the research facility operated by Texas State University at Freeman Ranch being the largest at seven acres.

Bog Bodies

Bog bodies or bog people are the naturally preserved corpses of humans and some animals recovered from peat bogs. The bodies have been most commonly found in the Northern European countries of Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and Ireland. Unlike most ancient human remains, bog bodies have retained their skin and internal organs due to the unusual conditions of the surrounding area. These conditions include highly acidic water, low temperature, and a lack of oxygen, combining to preserve but severely tan their skin. Despite the fact that their skin is preserved, their bones are generally not, as the acid in the peat dissolves the calcium phosphate of bone. Most, although not all, of these bodies have been dated to the Iron Age. Many show signs of having been killed and deposited in a similar manner, indicating some sort of ritual element, which many archaeologists believe show that these were the victims of human sacrifice in Iron Age Germanic paganism; though Cornelius Tacitus specifically describes bogging as a form of (sacralized) capital punishment in his 1st century work Germania.Hundreds of bog bodies have been recovered and studied. For a list of much more bog bodies visit wikipedia

The Tollund Man is the naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950 buried in a peat bog on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark, which preserved his body. The head and face were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim.The Tollund Man has been noted for the excellent preservation of his facial features. With the body, a sheepskin cap and a belt were found, although no additional article of clothing was preserved, likely to have decomposed. He also had a noose around his neck, indicating that he was hanged. Only his head remains original in his museum display due to lack of preservation knowledge at the time of discovery. It is believed that the Tollund Man was a ritual sacrifice victim.

The Bocksten Bog Man is the remains of a medieval male body found in a bog in Varberg Municipality, Sweden. It is one of the best-preserved finds in Europe from that era and is exhibited at the Varberg County Museum. The man had been killed and knocked to the bottom of a lake which later became a bog. The bog where the body was found lies about 15 miles east of Varberg on the west coast of Sweden, close to the most important medieval road in the area: the Via Regia.

The Osterby Man was discovered in a bog near Osterby, Germany, when two peat cutters were working. They unearthed the head two feet below the surface, which was wrapped in a roedeer skin cape. Scientists from the Archäologisches Landesmuseum Schleswig-Holstein estimated the man to have been around 50–60 years of age when he was killed. The man was decapitated; no other part of his body was ever found. His hair was in the Suebian knot hairstyle. The man’s hair had probably been a light blond color, but after being in the bog for a few thousand years, it turned a bright red. The knot dates back to around 2,000 years ago, where the Suebian knot was a common hair style. The Roman historian Tacitus described this style as typical of the Suebi tribe. The head is mainly a skull, but there is still a small amount of skin on it. The cause of the man’s death was a blow to the left temple.

The Grauballe Man is a bog body that was uncovered in 1952 from a peat bog near to the village of Grauballe in Jutland, Denmark. The body is that of an adult male dating from the late 3rd century BC, during the early Iron Age. Based on the evidence of his wounds, he was most likely killed by having his throat slit open. His corpse was then deposited in the bog, where his body was naturally preserved for over two millennia. His was not the only bog body to be found in the peat bogs of Jutland, with other notable examples being Tollund Man and the Elling Woman, thereby being a part of an established tradition at the time; it is commonly thought that these killings, including that of Grauballe Man, were examples of human sacrifice, a possibly important rite in Iron Age Germanic paganism. Grauballe Man has been described as “one of the most spectacular discoveries from Denmark’s prehistory” because it is one of the most exceptionally preserved bog bodies ever to be recorded. In 1955 the body went on display at the Moesgaard Museum near Aarhus, where it can still be seen today.

The Rendswühren Man was discovered in 1871, at the Heidmoor Fen, near Kiel in Germany. He was examined by autopsy, which at the time was the only way of examination. Professor P.V. Glob wrote that Rendswühren Man was estimated to have been 40–50 years of age when he was battered to death, which left a triangular hole in his head. He was found naked, with a piece of leather on his left leg. A cape was found near him. After discovery, his corpse was smoked for preservation. Textile typologically the clothing found with the body has been dated into the Roman Iron Age of the 1st or 2nd century CE.

Huldremose Woman is the name of the bog body of an elderly Iron Age woman discovered in 1879 near Ramten, Jutland, Denmark. The body, found clothed in a wool skirt and two skin capes, dated between 160 BCE and 340 CE. At the time of death, the woman was more than 40 years old—considered elderly for people of that time period. Her right arm was severed, but the injury was determined to have probably occurred by shovels during the unearthing. A wool cord tied her hair and enveloped her neck but forensic analysis found no indication of death by strangulation.

Damendorf Man was discovered in 1900 in the Seemoor at the village Damendorf in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. The remains are currently on display at the Archäologisches Landesmuseum. Professor P.V. Glob wrote that the man died in 300 BCE. What is unique about this bog body is the fact that the weight of the peat in the bog had flattened his body. Only his hair, skin, nails, and his few clothes were preserved. He was found with a leather belt, shoes, and a pair of breeches.

In 1946, Borremose man was discovered by peat diggers in the southernmost part of Borremose. First thought to be a murder victim, the body was later determined to be a bog body. The body was found a half meter down beneath a layer of birch sticks. The body was naked and two sheepskin coats and a woven cap lay beside it. Forensic analysis estimated the man’s height at 1.55 m (5 ft 1 in) and carbon dating placed the age of the body at ca. 700 B.C. Borremose Man was found with a 36 centimetres (14 in) rope with a slipknot around his neck indicating death by strangulation. However, examination also revealed a crushing blow to the back of the skull and the right femur had been broken.

And some reconstructions of  what seemed to be the original people have been made, especially for two women:

Yde Girl is a bog body found in the Stijfveen peat bog near the village of Yde, Netherlands. She was found on 12 May 1897 and was reputedly uncannily well-preserved when discovered (especially her hair), but by the time the body was turned over to the authorities a fortnight later it had been severely damaged and deteriorated. Carbon-14 tests have indicated that Yde Girl died between 54 BC and 128 AD at an approximate age of 16 years. She had long reddish blond hair, but one side of her head had been shaved before she died. Scans have shown that she suffered from a spine condition known as scoliosis. The body was found clad in a woolen cape and with a woolen band, made in a braiding technique known as sprang wrapped around the neck, suggesting she was executed or sacrificed. There was also a stab wound in the area of her collarbone, but that was not determined as the cause of death. As with most bog bodies, the skin and features are still preserved because of the tannic acid in the marsh water. The Yde Girl became internationally known when Neave made a reconstruction of her head, using techniques from plastic surgery and criminal pathology.

The Girl of the Uchter Moor also known as Moora is the name given to the female Iron Age bog body remains, discovered in 2000 in the marshland near Uchte, Germany. The remains include vertebrae, hair and skull pieces. The radiocarbon dating performed at the University of Kiel showed that Moora had died between 764 and 515 BCE. Despite common Iron Age burial practices, the body was not cremated. Moora was determined to be between 17 and 19 years old at the time of her death. She had slightly red hair and was left-handed. It is thought that Moora experienced intense physical labour and likely repeatedly carried heavy loads, like water jugs, while roaming through the marshland. According to Saring Dennis from the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Moora sustained at least two partial skull fractures that gradually healed themselves. Moora also suffered long periods of sickness associated with the hardships of long winters. The bone growth lines showed that during her childhood and adolescence, Moora suffered from chronic malnutrition. Moora was also diagnosed to have a benign tumor at the base of her skull, which led to the spine curvature and chronic inflammation in the leg bones. However Moora's cause of death is unknown. It was only determined that Moora was naked at the time she was deposited into the bog.

Mummies from Peru as 19th cent. illustrations

'Antigüedades Peruanas' (1851) by Peruvian museum curator Mariano Eduardo de Rivero and Swiss naturalist Dr Johann Jakob von Tschudi was a cultural and historical book, full of illustrations of artifacts, items and burial cuctoms from Peruvian precolombian civilizations. It was the result of their long survey and reasearch during 1830s and 1840s in Peru. And it was a scientific and artistic achievement of their time. The drawings of peruvian mummies are very impressive. You can see all illustrations of the book scanned in Flickr