[Sharon]

The woman in labor has no name. She must have had one at some point, but as bad luck would have it, she was hit and killed by a carriage as she walked in front of the San Carlos Royal College of Surgery, back in 18th-century Madrid.

Nobody claimed the body, whose round belly contained a child about to be born. It was quite a windfall for the surgeons in training at the school, which was always short of corpses on which to learn anatomy.

The body handlers proceeded according to customs of the era: mud was applied to the corpse and a mold created; this mold was filled with wax, and today it remains the most striking sculpture of at the Complutense University School of Medicine. She is a lying back against a chair with her belly sliced open like a pomegranate and the fetus exposed, its little head pointing down. She is a life-like, life-size wax statue.

Madrid is not the first city that boasts these kind of statues, Florence and London have them too (bottom pic), but Madrid counts an incredible variety of them, from 2,000 skulls, to statues with hearts on the right side of the body or with two penises and any sort of other deformity.

[TheFallOfTroyML]

looks amazing , very good post. thank you

[BabyJo84]

when anderfuck sees this

[GODREKR]

Here's a larger pic and another with the museum director.

[winvens]

Wow. Immortalized after death.

[Sharon]

Originally Posted by GODREKR ↗

Here's a larger pic and another with the museum director.

Excellent, thanks for that

[vagabond]

Excellent post! So sad for the mother- she was probably running in there to have her baby. It is a beautiful thing, 'tho.

[murofhsirgo]

i gotta say thats a tad wierd even for me

[LadyCPlum]

Hell, I'm feeling a sense of loss at seeing the baby....maybe only hours away from being brought into the world, and something like that happens. (As most of you can tell, anything having to do with deaths/injuries to babies and children does tend to have a somewhat exaggeratedly profound affect on me.)

[kellyhound]

very cool