When I was young I had relatives of my Great grandfather’s generation who would take pictures of the dead laid out at the funeral home. I never understood why they would want that picture but the older people never questioned it.
I saw a television show called “1900 House” in which a family lived in a row house in England under the exact conditions a family would have in 1900.
The most interesting takeway for me was the vat of boiling water they used to wash clothes and the quoted stat that in 1900 approximately 10,000 children in London died from burns suffered by falling into them.
“Life’ll kill ya.” - Warren Zevon
A Ping for vaccine mention.
I immediately thought of the movie “The Others.”
I once worked with a woman who took a photo of someone’s father at his funeral (viewing). This was about 25 years ago. I had never heard of such a thing in the modern era and was totally repulsed. Not sure if the family asked her to or if she did it on her own. She was a little... unusual anyway.
Thanks to youtube, you can see this custom is still practiced, updated with modern technology. I’m not sure why I always end up on the “dark side” of youtube, but I have seen entire montages of scenes where family members pose with dead babies. Usually, these are entitled “In memory of ___” or “We will miss you, ___.”
I actually watched one of these all the way through. It was rather morbid, to say the least.
My own mother ordered me not to take a photo of my sleeping baby with flowers in the background because it would look like one of these memorial photos.
These days many hospitals encourage mothers of stillborns to hold their baby and the staff often take photos, in case it would help the mother process her grief.
I wonder if it might simply be that, due to cost or other factors, many people had never had a photo taken of or with the deceased (certainly in the case of the infants this would be likely), so they took this as their last opportunity to capture an image of the departed.
As pointed out at the original site, often there were no pictures that had been made of the deceased in life. Photographs were expensive then and home photography had not yet come about.
It is not macabre that the grieving family would want a photograph to remember their loved one by, or that they would want it to look lifelike.
Death is as much a part of life as life itself, everyone goes through the process. Words like grim, macabre, morbid, haunting attempt to make death something other than a passage to the next LIFE or the continuation of life. Pleasant memories of the departed brought to life by a picture? Don’t really see wrong or bad associated with the desire to remember those who have passed to a life we will all graduate to.
Wow they are just beautiful. Those children to me are not dead but asleep just like Jesus said. Looking at the photos reminds me that they are now God’s little angels. There is nothing morbid about taking a photo of a dead person.
When my mother passed away someone took pictures of my mother in her coffin and Thank God for that. That is the last image I will see of her on this Earth. As with my father I did the same, I took photos of him in his coffin. Their last image of them on Earth before they are buried under feet of dirt never to be seen.
The funeral taker stated to me and my brother that when father arrived they were surprised to see how he looked so serene and looked as if was sleeping not “dead”.
The young man was shocked to say the least and quickly removed them off the wall of his bedroom.
I'm one that hates going to funerals and prefer to remember the loved-one as they were alive (just like most people). We all have plenty of photos to help us remember. Back in those days there were no photos like there are today.
Wow! as I type this something had just come to me.
My dad's brother died in the early 1970s. My dad was dumb-founded to see one of the nephews snapping a photo of his dad in the casket. My dad thought that was somewhat morbid.
That branch of the family lived in another state so we never really knew the family as well as we would have if they had lived in the same city. I recently found my cousins on Facebook and became friends. Never mentioned to them the taking of the photo of their dad in the casket but did learn that their father hated to have his photo taken so there no photos of him. Now I'm putting two and two together. They must have snapped that photo for the same reason these old photos were taken. To remember what their dad looked like.
In a way, it makes sense.
Early photography was very slow.. exposure times lasted minutes.
Naturally you would want a subject that could keep still.
I see nothing wrong with this. It was a different time, and with the advent of crude photography, this was the best they could do to remember their loved ones, and their interconnectedness with them.
Big cholera outbreak in London in the 1850’s - entire families wiped out overnight.
My grandmother loved to tell the story (guessing 1910’s) of the funeral of her uncle. The family all gathered around for a picture with uncle in the casket. They had to keep propping the casket up higher to get him in the shot until he tumbled out onto the floor. To her, in her old age, it was really funny but not when it happened.
Yuck..
One interesting thing. To me anyway. With the exception of a couple of the photographs the subjects look “healthy”, other than being dead of course. Looked like they died quickly. I would think the children and infants would look more wasted away.
The underlying reason for this was the tuberculosis epidemic, which traumatized much of Europe, though was less pronounced in the US.
Generally called Consumption, phthisis, scrofula, Pott’s disease, and the White Plague, tuberculosis was peculiar because it behaved so differently from most other diseases.
Its closest commonly known relative is leprosy. Unlike other bacteria, that reproduce on average about each half hour, they reproduce slowly, only once or twice a day. Even today, this means that treatment for those diseases can last from six months (for just infection that is not active) to years.
In any event, tuberculosis terrified people for several reasons. First because it could kill quickly, with very few obvious symptoms, or it could drag on for years or decades. A person could be infected yet not show symptoms for years, either.
Second, it could attack any organ in body, with very different results. When it hit the brain, a person could become wildly creative (which resulted in some calling it “the artists disease”), or they could become hyper-sexual, or they could become demented or insane.
Often people became very pale and gaunt as their body wasted away, which was actually adopted as a fashion, “the Victorian look”. Many had their spinal cords damaged by the disease, forcing them to use wheelchairs.
What we think of today as morbid and Gothic fashion sense was because of the fascination with death and dying and fatalism found at that time. The horror genre became very popular, with themes such as premature burial. Many novels would have characters suddenly vanish from the plot because they just up and died.
At the end of the 19th Century and in the first part of the 20th Century, effective treatments were finally developed. Then with the development of antibiotics the disease was almost eradicated in the US. The last tuberculosis sanitariums were finally closed in the 1960s, having run out of patients. They were distinguishable by their smokestacks, since they always burned their mattresses and linens.
Unfortunately, tuberculosis is coming back. At first, the disease developed drug resistance to some of the more common antibiotics. So it is identified as DR-TB.
The real problem began with multiple drug resistant, or MDR-TB. Because people with MDR-TB were given ordinary antibiotics to treat it, it would progress further before effective treatment, and in some cases it was too late, so the mortality rate increased.
Even worse is extensively drug resistant XDR-TB, which if you catch it, you must be quarantined, and you have at least a 50% chance of death. In the United States, 63 cases of XDR TB have been reported between 1993 and 2011.
There has now been two reports of totally drug resistant TDR-TB outbreaks, but they were so fast and lethal that everyone infected has died, stopping the disease from spreading.
Importantly, each of these varieties of TB coexist, so the vast majority of infections are not drug resistant.
TB is second only to HIV/AIDS as the greatest killer worldwide due to a single infectious agent. In 2011, 8.7 million people fell ill with TB and 1.4 million died from TB. Over 95% of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, and it is among the top three causes of death for women aged 15 to 44.
TB is a leading killer of people living with HIV causing one quarter of all deaths. Multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) is present in virtually all countries.