Six and I recently amended our route to Scotland to head for a small county hospital. I'd barely seen a picture of the hospital itself, but was sold on the place enough to drive an extra 40 miles for the simple fact it had a ceramic slab...
What is it about a mortuary which captures our interest? The fact that it's where we end up when we shuffle off our mortal coil? The fact that your average person never sees the inside of one while their heart is still beating? Or is it simply a morbid curiosity of seeing the inside of a building with so much stigma?
For me a ceramic slab is a thing of beauty despite it's sombre function. A slab is probably the largest single piece of glazed earthenware you'll ever see... I cannot think of anything larger. I love that there are often stylized headrests or waste pipes, touches of designs that the stainless replacements sadly lack. The other thing that I've noticed is that chopping up a dead fellow has obviously not really changed all that much in the past hundred years, so the mortuary escapes the modernization that often blights the hospitals they belong to
Below is a selection of mortuaries that I've been lucky enough to see that either retain a slab or something else of note.
What is it about a mortuary which captures our interest? The fact that it's where we end up when we shuffle off our mortal coil? The fact that your average person never sees the inside of one while their heart is still beating? Or is it simply a morbid curiosity of seeing the inside of a building with so much stigma?
For me a ceramic slab is a thing of beauty despite it's sombre function. A slab is probably the largest single piece of glazed earthenware you'll ever see... I cannot think of anything larger. I love that there are often stylized headrests or waste pipes, touches of designs that the stainless replacements sadly lack. The other thing that I've noticed is that chopping up a dead fellow has obviously not really changed all that much in the past hundred years, so the mortuary escapes the modernization that often blights the hospitals they belong to
Below is a selection of mortuaries that I've been lucky enough to see that either retain a slab or something else of note.