The Death Blog — Netflix and …

This is the ninth installment of the Death Blog series.

People once believed a person’s eyes retained a copy of whatever they saw right before death. It was especially common in the early 1900s, a time when the field of biology was growing and photography was taking the world by storm.

The process, known as optography, was developed in the late 1800s. It was a popular belief among occultists and clairvoyants that a person’s eyes retained the last image they saw. The process was even used on Mary Jane Kelly, one of the victims of Jack the Ripper, but to no avail.

By the early 1900s, optography was all the rage. Jules Verne went as far as to include it as a pivotal plot point in his 1902 novel, The Brothers Kip. In the book, the brothers are arrested for the murder of a ship captain. They are imprisoned and without much hope, until the victim’s son decides to take a closer look at an enlarged photograph of his late father’s head. It is then that he sees the image of his father’s true killers — two of the captain’s shipmates — and the brothers are finally exonerated. In the final chapter, Verne goes into the “science” behind the revelation:

For some time now it has been known — as a result of various interesting ophthamological experiments done by certain ingenious scientists, authoritative observers that they are —…