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The study of medicine and human anatomy has been vital to our survival as a species, but it hasn’t always been pretty. From dangerous beliefs to horrifying surgical techniques, humans have done a great deal of harm in the service of science. Six relics from medical history have inspired an immersive new series of eerie stories from Audible.
, free to subscribers on Audible in the UK, is a six-part series of short stories and nonfiction inspired by objects from the , London’s museum of medical history and science.
Six authors have each chosen an object from the Wellcome Collection’s permanent Medicine Man exhibit, which shows off Victorian entrepreneur and pharmacologist Henry Wellcome’s collection of medical implements from around the world. The episodes open with a brief discussion between the author and a curator or expert from the Wellcome Trust, which gives some historical and scientific context to the story that follows.
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The authors include , whose thriller My Sister, the Serial Killer was long-listed for the ; , whose novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock was short-listed for the ; and , whose novel The Silent Companions won the sponsored by bookselling chain WHSmith.
The series is produced by storyteller and sound artist , whose took third place for at the 2018 festival and whose in the UK professional category at the International Film & Audio Documentary Festival.
Released just in time for Halloween, the Audible series doesn’t shy away from its troubling subject matter. And despite being given a range of items to choose from, many of the authors gravitated toward skulls. Some chose literal human heads, including a trepanned skull and one that’s etched with phrenological markings. But there’s also a scold’s bridle (an iron mask used to punish gossiping women) and a wax “vanitas” head, an 18th-century memento mori that served as a reminder of the inevitability of death.
This vanitas head served as a reminder that pleasure is superficial and death is inevitable.
Wellcome Collection
It’s certainly the right time of year for stories about skulls, but Walker-Brown says the authors were drawn to items that suited the themes they were already interested in. The Master and the Student’s author, , had previously researched phrenology, a form of scientific racism that suggests people’s character and intelligence can be determined by the shape of their skull. And as Braithwaite points out when discussing her story, Scold’s Bridle, the free and unapologetic women she writes about are exactly the kind who’d be punished for speaking their minds.
chose a human skull that showed signs of trepanning, meaning it had been scraped or drilled into for medical purposes. It’s believed that the practice has been used to treat headaches, epilepsy and even depression, .
Hurley’s story, The Fool, was inspired by religious beliefs surrounding mental illness and hermes belts northstorm its treatment.
“In a lot of my writing as a novelist and a short story writer, I try to tackle things like faith and belief. And so I was really interested in the idea that by trepanning the skull, you can sort of release a demon or a dark spirit,” Hurley says in the interview that opens his episode.
