Name: Severed
ISBN: 9780871404541

Frances Larson

Explores the dark and varied obsessions of Western civilization with decapitated human heads, from collectors of shrunken heads and trophies of war to phrenologists and cryonicists.

A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

Severed

The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and it connects our inner selves to the outer world more intensely than any other part of the body. Yet there is a dark side to the head's pre-eminence, one that has, in the course of Western history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting. Over the centuries, human heads have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums. Long-regarded as objects of fascination and repulsion, they have been props for portrait artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. From the western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred brutal massacres, to the Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of Japanese opponents home to their girlfriends; from the memento mori in Romantic portraits to Damien Hirst's platinum skull set with diamonds; from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, fantastical and confounding history of the severed head, and offers us a new perspective on our macabre preoccupations.

Patrick Book

Informative, absolutely. But I’d hoped for something in the vein of Mary Roach, where this is more academic and serious-minded. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it isn’t necessarily the tone I was looking for in a severed head book. But that’s on me!

Severed A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

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