Humans are Bizarre

I haven't written in a bit because I've been lying down and feeling horrible a good percentage of the time. I'm on day 7 of a wicked dose of two antibiotics plus Prilosec and yesterday was my first day I felt no pain all day. Today I feel crappy again, great. I have such a distrust that anyone knows what they're talking about. Do I really have an ulcer? I've been to work with people with ulcers who were not rendered immobile. Bodies are bizarre.

So on that topic, since I had to be in the Longwood Medical area in Boston this morning for a derm appointment, I walked back behind the big granite/marble grandeur of Harvard Medical School to Shattuck Street and into the library on the end there. I'd heard that on the 5th floor there was an anatomical museum. I figured I could pay over $20 to see the Bodies exhibit at the Museum of Science, or I could check this out for free. There I went.

Around the atrium of the 5th floor are glass cases. It's small by museum standards, but fairly intense. There are anatomical models of things used by doctors. There are a number of skulls or parts of deformed people, sometimes with a drawing of the subject. Typically they were operated on and then died of infection. Just over a century ago we didn't know as much about keeping things sterile and we had not so much anesthesia. (Though opiates, alcohol, cannabis, mandrake, and more had been used throughout history, and nitrous oxide is a 18thc invention, ether and its like came later.) Abitrary fact for you: Oliver Wendell Holmes, the writer of the poem "Old Ironsides" which helped preserve the US Constitution coined the term Anesthesia and also invented things like stethescopes.

Anyway in the cases were minute fetal skeletons from various ages, deformities, two truly disturbing skeletons of conjoined twins, on in which the spine ended up in a torso and head both directions, the skulls of a number of famous cases include Phineas Gage, and a lot of truly frightening surgical, midwivery, and autopsy tools.

No photos were allowed, which you're probably happy about.