How do you feel when you see a picture of (human) corpses?

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I remember the first day of anatomy class. I was standing one meter closer to the cadaver than the others..

Also in physiology I was always the one who decapitated the frogs.

I think most people of the western society has become progressively softer the last 60 years. I feel like I'm emotionally stuck in the 1950s or something..

Oh dear.

Mort-bid fascination topic

Piles of corpses, bouncing or not, mean only one thing. Something bad happened, caused by humans or natural catastrophe. Not a nice thing, that I would wish on anyone, even Michael_Stuart.

I do see why someone wouldn't feel much upon seeing a human corpse. It's very, very obvious to me that these are not people; and not feeling anything upon seeing them wouldn't mean that you didn't have empathy for living people.

I'd be much more worried about someone who could look at a picture of living concentration camp prisoners and not react (unless they had seen many such images and only reacted the first few times they saw them--people do get used to horror, even of the worst sort, which I think must be how the survivors got through their experiences). I don't copy the emotions of people I see around me; not the people in real life nor the people in pictures; so my reaction is more of a moral outrage--"This is wrong! This should not exist!"--as though the world were trying to divide by zero and my brain was just rejecting it. But whether you copy emotions or not, I'd only be worried about your sense of compassion if you could know that someone else had been horribly hurt or killed, and not identify it rather instinctively as wrong.

I wonder if one of them is Jenny McCarthey.

I love gore and death; I'm fascinated by the many things that can happen to a human body, and being able to see the insides that we'll (hopefully) never see in ourselves. (You'll never be able to see your skeleton, for example.)

I want to be a forensic pathologist. Nothing would make me happier. There's so many things that one can learn about a person's life by looking at their bones alone. Soft tissues tell an even more detailed story. I love that I can discern whether a person was right or left handed by simply looking at their scapulae, and that TMJ can be diagnosed by simply looking at a skull. The body is an amazing thing.

Last edited by wendigopsychosis on 28 Jun 2010, 6:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

Mutilations, Inc. topic

You do realize these people died horribly, most of them at the hands of a human perpetrator.

I noticed the guy with his lower half blown off. Probably a suicide bomber whose detonation device was not powerful enough to vapourize him.

There is an element of sex involved in most of these pictures in your gore gallery. This is what I find disturbing.

Do not desensitize yourself to the humans whose frozen death pics grace your hard drive. This could be YOU in my museum.

I don't see anything wrong with necrophilia(sexual arousal from the dead), and I don't care that I offend you. Desensitization can be a good thing, as described by Callista.

I see anger and fear in you, Sartresue. Stop being an idiot with blind faith in cultural normalcy.

I have discovered it depends on the corpse. For example, when I was living in Pittsbrugh, the Bog People exhibit came to the Natural History museum. The exhibit consists of bronze age artifacts found in peat bogs in Europe, and included dead bodies. These bodies were fascinating and not at all bothersome to me -- they were flat, all tanned deep brown, with bleached red hair. I wasn't bothered at all! My mother, who went with me, avoided them and I couldn't see why.

Same story with mummies. Mummies don't bother me at all, wrapped or unwrapped. I really want to go to the King Tut exhibit in Philadelphia before it goes back to Cairo (but even though I have a lot of family there, I don't think I'll be there until post-Tut). My parents were like, "You know it has mummies in it, right? Corpses...." Yes, I know that. But mummies are fascinating. Those corpses don't bother me a bit.

So I figured I had no fear of corpses, until I was in grad school. For some reason, my class on teaching math in an elementary classroom met in the building that was primarily for bio and pre-med majors. I have a bad tendon in my right leg that sometimes makes long walks or climbing stairs hard, and it was acting up one day, so I decided to take the elevator. I boarded and heard someone call, "Hold the elevator!" I did so, until I saw that the person was wheeling a guerny with a sheet-covered corpse on it. I felt my gorge rise and as soon as they got to the elevator I bolted off and ran for the stairs. I imagine the look of sheer horror on my face must have been comical!

As far as I can tell, ancient preserved corpses don't bother me, but present-day unpreserved ones do, even when covered with a sheet. I could not take that elevator for months after, no matter how badly my leg was acting up! (I had to hop up the stairs on my left leg occasionally, putting weight on my right hurt too much.)

Agreed. I thought about forensic pathology at one point, but chose another path.

I didn't have much problem in anatomy class.

~Kate

Just to clarify, Im not into gore....I actually hate slasher movies even though they are not real, they make me upset. I have a friend who is into slasher movies and she is also an Aspie but I dont like them. Also I was very upset by seeing the movies they show you of the concentration camps in high school.
I thought this thread was just about being freaked out by corpses, not genocide or gore. I mean the guy that went though the threasher thing that I saw on the movie at the morgue was pretty graphic but I thought it was cool that they were able to sew him back together because it was what the family wanted.
I have seen dead children, In the hospital and my own nephew. Its very sad when children die and I get very upset when I see people driving with their kids not even in seat belts much less car seats.

I can look at dead people and not be horrified.

It grosses me out if people do gross things with corpses though.

Eye faith topic

I have no fear of the likes of you and Wendigopsychosis. I am also not angry. And as for cultural nromalcy, you have no idea of the who I am and where I stand on such issues. If there is anything I feel at all when I read posts like yours, it is pity.

You and WenP are now part of my museum. You make interesting additions.

I guess it depends on the corpse, and how they died.
I remember seeing a picture in a photojournalistic exhibtion that showed a room of unclaimed corpses from the boxing day Tsunami. Men, women, children , babies, frozen in the moment of drowning.That really affected me.

I'm confused by your reply. Yes, of course I realize these people died horribly. Why does that change anything? I don't think it's possible to be hit by a train without dying horribly.

And what element of sex? I've never thought of death as a sexual thing. If there are sexual elements, it's due to the photo, or perhaps you're reading into it a bit too much. Many of the crime victims I've collected photos of were killed in "crimes of passion" (which is a stupid name for sex murders, I think. Too romantic sounding). I collect photos of women who were raped and then killed not because of the rape, but because of the murder. If there's a photo of a woman with her head cut off and her underwear around her ankles, I'm looking at the severed neck.

And why shouldn't I be desensitized? What bad is it doing to me? If I'm brutally murdered, then there's nothing I can do about it, and I honestly wouldn't care if a photo of the crime scene were added to a gallery, or my body to a museum. I'm dead, and taking a picture isn't what's killed me.

Dead bodies are pieces of meat, they aren't people anymore. They used to be conscious, aware human beings, but now they are just slowly decomposing tissue, no longer integrated and aware.

What museum is this, by the way? I'm assuming it's a collection of people you'd like to murder, in which case, I'm honored.
Unless it's some sort of lame hall-of-fame for weirdos, which is just sort of silly.