Atlas Obscura - Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations
Mission

Find the death mask of the world's most kissed suicide victim.

Morbid Anatomy Library & Giftshop

MISSION BRIEF

Opened in 2014, the Morbid Anatomy Museum is dedicated to the celebration of artifacts at the intersection of death and beauty.

On the second floor, behind the exhibition space, you'll find the Morbid Anatomy Library, a collection of over 2,000 books that touch on the history and aesthetics of death and medicine.

Inside the library, look for a copy of the death mask of the "Inconnue de la Seine," an unidentified young woman who drowned herself in the river Seine in 1900. Enchanted by the mysterious corpse’s beauty, a morgue worker made a plaster cast of the woman’s face, and copies of this “drowned Mona Lisa,” as Camus would later describe her, soon proliferated across Paris.

In 1958, when the creators of Rescue Annie, the first popular CPR dummy, needed to put a face on their mannequin, they chose the Inconnue as their model, making her lips perhaps the most kissed of all time.

Address
254 36th Street

Building 2, room C248.
Brooklyn, New York, 11215
United States