In Popular Culture
The concept of a body farm in general as well as the existing institutions in particular have been used in several crime-related works of popular culture. Notable examples include:
- Patricia Cornwell's novel The Body Farm is based on the University of Tennessee facility, but not on actual events surrounding it. The character of Dr. Thomas Katz was based upon Dr. Bill Bass. In his book, Death's Acre, which has a foreword by Cornwell, Bass and co-author Jon Jefferson describe the experiment he undertook on her behalf. A similar experiment conducted by the fictional Dr. Katz solves the book's mystery.
- Authors Jon Jefferson and Bill Bass have published a number of fictional murder mystery novels based on the body farm at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville under the pseudonym Jefferson Bass. The lead character is based on Bill Bass.
- In the British television series Waking the Dead, forensic pathologist Dr Eve Lockhart has her own body farm. She reappears in a spin-off series The Body Farm.
- During episode #6.17 of Fox's television series Bones entitled "The Feet on the Beach", medical anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan and her partner FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth visit a fictional body farm at the University of Hogansburg, New York.
- In episode #2.15 of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation entitled "Burden of Proof" a murder victim's body is dumped at the Body Farm among other bodies.
- Simon Beckett's novel Whispers of the Dead is set in and around the body farm in Knoxville, Tennessee. It is the third book in a series centered around protagonist Dr David Hunter, a forensic anthropologist. The series itself was inspired by Beckett's visit to the body farm in Tennessee.
Read more about this topic: Body Farm
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)