Herodotus writes in The Histories that, to discourage intercourse with a corpse, ancient Egyptians left deceased beautiful women to decay for "three or four days" before giving them to the embalmers. Herodotus also alluded to suggestions that the Greek tyrant Periander had defiled the corpse of his wife, employing a metaphor: "Periander baked his bread in a cold oven." Acts of necrophilia are depicted on ceramics from the Moche culture, which reigned in northern Peru from the first to eighth century CE. A common theme in these artifacts is the masturbation of a male skeleton by a living woman. Hittite law from the 16th century BC through to the 13th century BC explicitly permitted sex with the dead. In what is now Northeast China, the ethnic Xianbei emperor Murong Xi (385–407) of the Later Yan state had intercourse with the corpse of his beloved empress Fu Xunying, after the latter was already cold and put into the coffin.In Renaissance Italy, following the reputed moral collapse brought about by the Black Death and before the Roman Inquisition of the Counter-Reformation, literature was replete with sexual references; these include necrophilia, as in the epic poem Orlando Innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo, first published in 1483. In a notorious modern example, American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was a necrophiliac. Dahmer wanted to create a sex slave who would mindlessly consent to whatever he wanted.
The issue of bronchospasm acquired prominence in the neuromuscular-blocking agents arena after the withdrawal from clinical use of rapacuronium (Raplon - a steroidal neuromuscular-blocking agent marketed by Organon) in 2001 after several serious events of bronchospasm, including five unexplained fatalities, following its administration. Bronchospasm was not an unknown phenomenon prior to rapacuronium: occasional reports of bronchospasm have been noted also with the prototypical agents, tubocurarine and succinylcholine, as well as alcuronium, pancuronium, vecuronium, and gallamine. Seizures
Seizures rarely occur.Because atracurium undergoes Hofmann elimination as a primary route of chemodegradation, one of the major metabolites from this process is laudanosine, a tertiary amino alkaloid reported to be a modest CNS stimulant with epileptogenic activity and cardiovascular effects such a hypotension and bradycardia. As part of the then fierce marketing battle between the competing pharmaceutical companies (Burroughs Wellcome Co. and Organon, Inc.) with their respective products, erroneous information was quickly and subtly disseminated very shortly after the clinical introduction of atracurium that the clinical use of atracurium was likely to result in a terrible tragedy because of the significant clinical hazard by way of frank seizures induced by the laudanosine by-product - the posited hypothesis being that the laudanosine produced from the chemodegradation of parent atracurium would cross the blood–brain barrier in sufficiently high enough concentrations that lead to epileptogenic foci. Fortunately, both for the public and for atracurium, rapid initial investigations irrefutably failed to find any overt or EEG evidence for a connection between atracurium administration and epileptogenic activity.