Past Mortems: Life and death behind mortuary doors
Carla Valentine

• Monday 12 June 2017, 7.40PM to 8.30pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
• RCH/037, Ron Cooke Hub, University of York (map|getting to campus)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

A day in the life of Carla Valentine - curator, pathology technician and 'death professional' - is not your average day. She spent ten years training and working as an Anatomical Pathology Technologist: where the mortuary slab was her desk and that day's corpses her task list.

Join Carla, author of Past Mortems, as she tells stories of those years. She investigates the body alongside our attitudes towards death and reveals the truth about what happens when the mortuary doors swing shut or the lid of the coffin closes ...

About the speaker

Carla Valentine is the ‘chick’ who works with the dead: a concise way to describe her range of interests and professional skills. She is a qualified Anatomical Pathology Technologist (Mortuary Technician or ‘Mortician’) holding both the Certificate and Diploma in Anatomical Pathology Technology, and currently researching our relationships with human remains.

Through the course of her career, she has carried out autopsies on Coronial, hospital and forensic cases, both paediatric and adult. This work also included CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear) and other high risk cases like SARS, Swine Flu and CJD. In her spare time she studied Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology which led to her excavating plague graves in Venice and World War I graves in Belgium, as well as medieval burials in Chester.

Carla is now the Technical Curator of a Victorian Pathology Museum, restoring the 5000 anatomical specimens to their former glory and teasing stories from the dead in a different way. She organises events to showcase the collection, teaching students at the Academy of Forensic Medical Sciences, and conserving anatomical specimens every day. She talks about the specimens on YouTube and to anyone who’ll listen, and is in the enviable position of having one foot firmly planted in the future of Pathology, and one firmly in the past.

Waterstones

Books will be available to buy from the Waterstones' stall at this event.

Tickets