SoylentNews

tonyPick [soylentnews.org] writes:

Strange Remains has an article on the history of Optography; the attempt to retrieve the last image seen by the eyes before death [strangeremains.com], and the 19th century experiments of Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne.

He believed it was possible to develop images, like photographs, from the eyes of the dead. Kühne called the image fixed on the corpse’s retina an optogram, and the process of developing this image optography
...
Kühne’s research was inspired by the work of physiologist Franz Christian Boll. In 1876, Boll discovered a pigment in the rods of the human retina that bleaches in the light and is restored in the dark. Kühne took this observation a step further by demonstrating that retinal pigment, which he called “visual purple” (also known as rhodopsin), remains after death unless the retinas are exposed to light.

A fascinating, and slightly macabre look at an early piece of the history of forensic science.

Link Spotted at Cocktail Party Physics Week in Review [typepad.com]

Original Submission