beaucoupspookoo: ““A Brief Note on What Can be Seen in the House of the Prince of San Se
beaucoupspookoo:““A Brief Note on What Can be Seen in the House of the Prince of San Severo”, published in 1766, and therefore most likely written by the Prince himself, reads: “In the Chapel one can see two Anatomic Machines, that is, skeletons, a male and a female, made by injection, which because of their being complete and of their having undergone such diligent treatment, can be said to be unique in all of Europe”. It is believed that the veins were injected with a certain substance which, upon entering the circulatory system, gradually blocked it up to the point of causing the death of the subject. At that point, the substance might have “metalicized” the veins and arteries, preserving them from decomposition. Others state that the preservation method was performed on dead bodies, but as blood no longer travels in a dead body, we need to ask how all the veins were preserved. Equally, it is known that the Prince must have waited for the skin and flesh to completely decompose before obtaining what he calls the “anatomic machines”.That is not the only problem: the hypodermic syringe that would have been necessary to make the “injection” was officially only invented one hundred years later by a surgeon from Lyon, Carlo Gabriele Pravaz (1791-1853). Hence, others have stated that di Sangro “merely” took a skeleton and covered it with an artificial network of blood vessels. Some believe he used wax to create the arteries. But: tests performed on the “machines” in the 1950s revealed that “the whole system of blood vessels, upon analysis, showed that it was metalicized, that is they were soaked in and kept their shape by the metals settling in it”. It is also known that di Sangro was able to compose a material similar to the substance – deemed to be blood – in the ampoule of San Gennaro, a precious relic that Naples continues to worship each January and which is said to miraculously liquefy during the ceremony; in fact, di Sangro did not want to underline too much that what he had invented was identical to the relic’s substance, but “like” it. Still, how the Prince accomplished this and the two “anatomical machines” remains a mystery.” -- source link
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#body horror#corpse#i guess