Bentham's bonce

[oursin]

Further to extensive discussions on my last post about JB's auto-icon.

I'm pretty sure that the actual head has been photoshopped in to the image I posted, because last I heard it was kept in a vault at UCL (in fact, I think somewhere in the archive store) because, not only did it rapidly demonstrate the limitations of Victorian mummification techniques and become extremely grotesque, sometime during the 1980s it became infested with carpet-beetle and had to undergo extensive and specialised conservation treatment.

(And everyone will be getting Bentham keyrings from me for Christmas, hmmmm?)

ETA MI BENTHAM LOLTHEORISTZ, LET ME SHOW U THEM (from my mad lol-thing phase last summer).

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Museum people who inherit e.g. large collections of badly preserved C19th taxidermy specimens, I should think. Or Colonel X's collection of shrunken heads he picked up while in Borneo.

I suspect that it may be the conservation staff from the Museum of Mankind or the Pitt-Rivers moonlighting.

[thera-flu.livejournal.com]

It makes sense now that you say it. And I love the idea of the Pitt-Rivers moonlighting. And someone had to restore some of those Victorian cats that were at the V&A a while ago, right?

I know so little about 19th century medicine, taxonomy, etc, it's scary. There are taboos in place that the 17th century practitioners I read about would have scoffed at. And vice versa, I suppose.