John Martin (1789-1854) was a hugely popular English painter of vast, often apocalyptic scenes.
'The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah' dates from 1852 and is five feet high and nearly eight feet wide. In the foreground, Lot and his daughters hurriedly flee the swirling inferno of God's terrible wrath. Far behind them, still in poignantly recognisable human form, is the arrested and petrified figure of their fatally curious wife / mother.
In his short discussion paper 'The Chemical Death of Lot's Wife', published in the Royal Journal of Medicine in 1988, Professor Irving M. Klotz gives a detailed explanation of the environmental conditions that would led 'Mrs. Lot' to die instantly from rigor calcium carbonitis and turn into a rigid block of calcite, salted by moisture heavy crosswinds originating from the nearby Dead Sea. He includes chemical formulas and calculations, and clearly knows science stuff, so I am in no position to push back on any of it.
He concludes by writing 'Thus, once again, we see how modern science serves to corroborate and elucidate medical events described in the Bible', and, in this instance at least, I can't disagree with that either.
Finally, just to make this about me again rather than Professor Klotz, one of my first conceptual art objects was a poorly made facsimile Airfix box purporting to contain this cataclysmic scene in model form. No great message, I just thought it was a nice idea.
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