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Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
A Taphophilia Thank You...
Taphophilia (dot) Com would not be possible without the knowledge, experience and talent of DarkestWeb. From its conception and early development, DarkestWeb was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.
Announcements
Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!
Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
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Corpse Thieves Thrive as "Body Brokers', $900 for Severed Head |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Friday, 31 March 2006 |
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There's a thin man with nervous eyes in Liverpool, my birthplace. He's charming, deferential, an expert at his job. I can't stand the sight of him.
He's a funeral director, and has buried more members of my family in recent years than seems fair. The only time our paths cross is when someone I love has died.
Most families buried their own dead until the 1800s, when people began to hand the task to professional embalmers, writes Annie Cheney in ``Body Brokers'' (Broadway, 193 pages, $23.95). She then details what can happen when that abdication of responsibility backfires. It makes for gruesome reading.
``Every year in the United States, tens of thousands of corpses enter the cadaver trade, a business that supplies the bodies and parts of the dead to scientists, surgical equipment corporations, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and researchers all over the world,'' she writes. ``Each corpse that travels through the system can generate anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000.''
A shoulder can fetch as much as $650. Knees go for between $450 and $650 each. A head with its brain intact can cost $900.
Alistair Cooke
The dead aren't always anonymous. The bones of Alistair Cooke, who created the BBC's ``Letter From America'' and hosted PBS's ``Masterpiece Theatre,'' were stolen in 2004 and sold for more than $7,000, the New York Daily News reported in December.
``Body Brokers'' expands on an award-winning article that Cheney wrote for Harper's magazine. The new bones she exhumes are unfortunately too brittle to support a whole book; too few examples make the work feel unsubstantial.
Her chief body snatcher is Michael Francis Brown, a crematorium owner in Lake Elsinore, 70 miles (110 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles. In 2000, Brown started offering free cremations to families willing to donate the bodies of dead relatives. He also won a contract to cremate his area's unclaimed dead.
``Soon everyone in the market for parts knew about the unusually fertile source of corpses in southern California, and the orders started pouring in,'' Cheney writes.
What Brown didn't have was permission -- from either the dead or their families -- to trade their torsos, spines and elbows. In 2003, he pleaded guilty to 66 charges of mutilation and embezzlement. The Riverside County Superior Court sentenced Brown to 20 years in prison; he'd made more than $400,000 in three years.
Tissue Transfer
The most damaging activity of the brokers is detailed at the end of the book, where Cheney shows how knee tissue from a Utah suicide victim, dubbed Donor 58600, wound up in the body of 23- year-old Brian Lykins in Minnesota.
Because Donor 58600's body wasn't refrigerated within 12 hours of his death, his tissue was ineligible under U.S. Food and Drug Administration rules to fill a gap left in Lykins's knee by surgery to remove a bone chip.
That didn't keep not-for-profit Intermountain Donor Services from selling the material to transplant-tissue provider CryoLife Inc. for $10,500. On Nov. 7, 2001, Lykins had a routine procedure to pack out his knee cavity; four days later, he died from organ failure. More than 25 other patients were infected by diseased tissue from Donor 58600.
Lykins's family sued CryoLife, which settled the lawsuit in 2003 on terms that weren't disclosed. In July, the company paid $23.3 million to shareholders who alleged they'd been misled about government investigations into the company's procedures.
Testing for Infection
The fallout continues. Earlier this month, the FDA said doctors who bought from Biomedical Tissue Services Ltd. should test their patients for potentially infectious diseases. In February, the FDA ordered Biomedical to cease all manufacturing.
The damage done to the living by recycling body parts from the dead without sufficient checks is far more worrying than the moral repugnance of bodysnatching. Still, next time I attend a conference in some anonymous hotel, I'll find it hard to shake the thought that the room may previously have hosted a row of corpse-bearing gurneys attended by eager doctors learning the latest surgical techniques. SOURCE: www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000088&sid=a5oeEADarndw&refer=culture#
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved, and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.” John McRae 1915From In Flan
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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