SciFest: Walking through a cemetery as a Victorian gentleman, learning about death
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Last week's Philadelphia Science Festival event, reviewed.
Upon entering the Laurel Hill Cemetery for the “Cure You or Kill You” event, part of the Philadelphia Science Festival last Thursday, my fellow attendees and I were given name tags with various Victorian identities to assume for the course of the tour. I played the part of Edward Charles Esterson, a 26-year-old man whose occupation was “gentleman,” which I assume basically means “Victorian trust fund baby.”
The walking tour of the cemetery grounds consisted of five stops. At each, our tour guide Alexis Jeffcoat, the development and programs coordinator at Laurel Hill Cemetery, entertained us with stories of real Victorian Philadelphians and their experiences with the medicine of the day.
Jeffcoat designed a game where at each stop our characters would make a hypothetical choice. Tragedy struck on the first option, when over half of the guests chose to move from the countryside to seek their fortune in the city. Unfortunately, this was 1849 and the second cholera epidemic to strike Philadelphia wiped out all but two brewers who had their lives spared thanks to their boiled water supplies. Booze saves the day!
Alcohol would prove medicinal again when later we chose whether to accept a gin and tonic from a jolly drunk soldier that ultimately saved some of us thanks to the discovery that the quinine in the Shweppes Indian Tonic Water could be used to fight malaria.
I didn’t feel Edward Charles Esterson would have relished leaving his vast country estate for the overcrowded conditions of the city, so I remained breathing. Among the various graves we visited was that of Adam Forepaugh, a bitter rival of P.T. Barnum in the circus business. A terrific asshole of a man, it’s alleged that he falsely attributed the “There’s a sucker born every minute” quote to Barnum to make him unpopular to the public. In 1903, Forepaugh allowed Thomas Edison to publicly kill an elephant with alternating current in an attempt to discredit Tesla and show Tesla’s alternating current was wildly dangerous compared to Edison’s direct current.
At the grave of Samuel J. Creswell — the ironworks mogul who made many of the sewer grates that can still be found in parts of the city — we learned of his unfortunate demise during a routine tooth pulling: He passed out from nitrous oxide poisoning, and the dentists decided to bleed him, which led to his death.
The evening culminated with a performance from the Franklin Institute’s Traveling Science Show, who showed off a large Tesla coil emitting bolts of electricity at the frequencies of the notes to the Indiana Jones theme song.
Alas, nerds will be nerds, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
