Frances Larson > Quotes

“Decapitation is faster and more predictable than death by hanging, lethal injection, electric shock or gassing, but the spectacle is too grim for our sensibilities.”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

“Visitors say, 'Real shrunken heads! Wow! How were they made? By slitting the skin, taking out the skull and brains and steaming them with hot sand? Gross!' But what no one asks is: how did they get here? What are they doing hanging up in a university museum in the south of England? Once you start to answer that question, you realize that shrunken heads like these are a product as much of European curiosity, European taste and European purchasing power as they are of an archaic tribal custom. It is time to turn the spotlight round and point it back at people like you and me, and at our ancestors, who were responsible for bringing hundreds of these heads into museums and people's homes and who delighted in them as much as -- if not more than -- the people who created them in the first place. After all, it is not the Shuar who are pressing their noses to the glass of an exhibition case in an Oxford University museum.”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

“For centuries, state executions of every kind were popular entertainment for ‘all ranks and degrees’ of society,”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

“A typical brain bank, such as the New York Brain Bank at Columbia University, comprises office space, a dissection room, a laboratory, a storage room for samples that are fixed in formalin, and a freezer room.”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

“a skull, in many ways, is the antithesis of a living person’s face.”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

“Death levels all great men,”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

“is a book about severed heads. Our history is littered with them. The word ‘headhunting’ conjures up exotic, strange and dangerous worlds far from civilization, but the truth is that human heads have long been paraded closer to home. We have our own particular traditions when it comes to headhunting and, over the centuries, human heads have embellished almost every facet of our society, from the scaffold to the cathedral, and from the dissecting room to the art gallery. Our traditions of decapitation run deep”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

“The power of the beheading ritual in our society reverberates today in everyday idioms, gestures and jokes.”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

“is a book about severed heads. Our history is littered with them. The word ‘headhunting’ conjures up exotic, strange and dangerous worlds far from civilization, but the truth is that human heads have long been paraded closer to home. We have our own particular traditions when it comes to headhunting and, over the centuries, human heads have embellished almost every facet of our society, from the scaffold to the cathedral, and from the dissecting room to the art gallery. Our traditions of decapitation run deep and linger on, albeit tacitly, even today.”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

“One of the most ambitious scanning projects is the Open Research Scan Archive, which aims to produce a database of high-resolution three-dimensional CT scans of all the crania housed in the Mütter Museum, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History,”
― Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found