The incredible story of Susan Potter, the "immortal corpse"

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/14/the-incredible-story-of-susan.html

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Pretty sure my band opened for Immortal Corpse in 2006

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Stiff Little Fingers played that night too if I remember correctly.

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I might have thought that cultivating a certain capacity to distance oneself would be an important part of a surgeon’s education – for one would not want to freeze up in the middle of an operation with thoughts of frustration, pain, and disappointment. But then, I can’t say I’ve looked into the subject much.

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It wasn’t Exquisite Corpse?

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I remember a story I saw about “slicing a frozen corpse” when it was done to an executed male prisoner in 1994. It was a fascinating story.
Visible Human Project

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Beautiful. I like it a lot that they interviewed her. If you then afterwards look at the digital imagery it’ll be a person instead of just a model.

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Heads up folks. There is footage of people using a hand saw to cut through a human body.

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Thank you for the trigger warning.

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But, is her sphincter made of chocolate?

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Wasn’t this woman once in the Dead Kennedys?

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Now I have the Cranberries “Zombie” running through my head.

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…are they still around…?

Strange.
The Zombies were also on the bill when @Akimbo_NOT went to the gig noted earlier, above.

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You may be in the wrong thread, but then I haven’t seen your Amazon Wishlist so maybe not.

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Given that the text of the article states that they froze the corpse and then cut it into 27,000 slices, each thinner than a human hair, I’m surprised that they used a handsaw. Wouldn’t that kind of precision require some kind of machine?

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That’s very haunting, but i suppose that’s point of it all. Medical students need to see that the subjects they study are or used to be living people. They are not just symptoms on a chart. I’m glad this woman’s life and death are proving valuable to a new generation of medical students and doctors.

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Maybe you haven’t seen this guy…

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Not to be too gruesome but it looked like it was a practical decision. It looked like the containers they used to mold and hold the remains for precision slicing weren’t big enough.

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Well i didn’t realise that the word “slices” is a little inaccurate given that the handsaw is simply used to cut the body into sections and then each section is ground away with a machine and each new layer is photographed. So there are no slices as such just corpse dust which is gone forever, i guess there are digital slices though.

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