Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.

A serious and seriously entertaining exploration of the dark and varied obsessions that the 'civilized West' has had with decapitated heads and skulls

About the Author
DR FRANCES LARSON is an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford and the author of a biography of Henry Wellcome, An Infinity of Things, which was a Sunday Times Book of The Year and a New Scientist Best Book of 2009. She is also the co-author of Knowing Things (OUP, 2007), a book on the history of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where she worked as a researcher after receiving her D.Phil.


Book Information
ISBN 9781783780563
Author Dr Frances Larson
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Granta Books
Publisher Granta Books
Weight(grams) 281g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 20mm