(1/6) THREAD 👇Photo of an unidentified victim of the TITANIC being embalmed on the deck of the Mackay Bennett, which was one of four ships chartered by the White Star Line to collect bodies shortly after the disaster. The ship and its crew were able to recover over 300 bodies. (2/6) When it set sail, the Mackay Bennett carried with it 100 coffins, 100 tons of ice, and 12 tons of iron bars which were used to bury badly decomposed bodies at sea. Passenger bodies in “satisfactory condition” were embalmed.

THREAD 👇 (1/10) #FolkloreTuesday: During the 19th century, many people living in Derbyshire meticulously collected and stored their fallen or extracted teeth in jars. When a person died, these teeth were placed inside the coffin alongside the corpse. (Photo: Hunterian). (2/11) On Judgment Day, those who failed to do this would be damned to search for the lost teeth in a bucket of blood located deep within the fiery pits of Hell. Stories like this help us to understand why people in the past feared the anatomist’s knife.

THREAD: Photo of a smallpox patient, 1908. Smallpox is one of the deadliest & most contagious diseases known to mankind. The virus killed over half a billion people in the twentieth century alone—three times the number of deaths from all of the century’s wars combined. The human species is the only natural host of smallpox. No other organism can harbor the virus. Once inside the body, it begins replicating itself millions of times over. The incubation period is around ten days, during which time an infected person shows no signs of being ill.