Red Cross Continues

Today we cleared out the back cupboard a bit and found a few interesting things. It's blatently obvious things are allowed to get old and have been around for a hell of a time, but well..

We found three very old massive books, describing anatomy, which were written in 1859 and 1869. Looking at the drawings, you saw how wonderfully detailled and well drawn they were, and then also, you noticed something sticking out of them.

"What's that?"

And we noticed they were hooks and chains.

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The descriptions next to the drawings said of cutting the bodies open, and describing the visual appearence of a dead body. It seems the drawings were made of the dead bodies whilst being studied.

That was fascinating enough, but it gets.. different.

My friend mentioned that as a child the boss had this box of fake bones that she'd give to the children to scare them, and say about how she was secretly a grave-digger and so forth. Sounded awesome, so the box was found.

I took the bones out of the box, and looked at them. They were incredibly realistic.. amazingly detailed, you could see between the bones where they were cracked, and sawn.. and..

"..these are real bones."

There was even a cigarette box with finger bones in it. If they were fakes, I just.. couldn't fault them, the most realistic looking bones I've ever seen in my life and I'm willing to swear they were bones.

Then, we found a piece of withered paper at the bottom of the box. I can't remember the exact words, but it was a flyer from a shop in London from the 19th century. It described various bones of the body, saying all were available, and then said "We buy or sell bones."

..I washed my hands not long after that. I would have taken a photo but I'm so genuinely convinced that they were real bones I wanted to respect the dead.