BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF LIEUTENANT WILLIAM HUNTER, OF GREENWICH HOSPITAL: An intimate Friend of the Poet FALCONER

Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid Aztec-European heritage. Death is their intimate friend; death is mocked and accepted with irony and fatalistic abandon. The commonplace nature of death desensitizes Mexicans to suffering. Death, simply put, defines Mexico. There must have been historical actors who looked away from human misery, but to essentialize a diverse group of people as possessing a unique death cult delights those who want to see the exotic in Mexico or distinguish that society from its peers. Examining tragic and untimely death—namely self-annihilation—reveals a counter narrative. What could be more chilling than suicide, especially the violent death of the young? What desperation or madness pushed the victim to raise the gun to the temple or slip the noose around the neck? A close examination of a wide range of twentieth-century historical documents proves that Mexicans did not accept death with a cavalier chuckle nor develop a unique death cult, for that matter. Quite the reverse, Mexicans behaved just as their contemporaries did in Austria, France, England, and the United States. They devoted scientific inquiry to the malady and mourned the loss of each life to suicide.

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XXX. An account of an extraordinary acephalous birth. By W. Cooper, M.D. in a letter to William Hunter, M.D. F. R. S

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London ◽

10.1098/rstl.1775.0032 ◽

1775 ◽

Vol 65 ◽

pp. 311-321 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Keyword(s):

Royal Society ◽

Female Child ◽

Short Description ◽

Anatomical Structure ◽

Abdominal Tumour ◽

Natural Labour ◽

William Hunter

Dear Sir, I take the liberty to remit you an account of the delivery of a very curious acephalous monster, accompanied with a short description of its anatomical structure. If, after a perusal of it, you should apprehend it may be acceptable to the Royal Society, I beg that you will do me the honour to lay it before them. Mrs. Brackett, of Clerkenwell Close, aged twenty-three years, was, at the end of her first pregnancy, by a natural labour, delivered of a perfect female child, on Friday the 8th of October, 1773, at seven o'clock in the morning. The attending midwife, Mrs. Ayres, soon perceived by the abdominal tumour that there was another child. After waiting about three hours, a flooding came on; but without pain, or any advancement of the second delivery. The hæmorrhage producing faintness, debility, and danger, the attendants and midwife were alarmed, and I was sent for. When I came, I found her in the situation above described; and therefore thought it my duty to accomplish the remaining part of the labour, as soon as I could, consistently with the safety of the mother.

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