Fascinating conference alert: Annual American Association for the History of Medicine Meeting starts up tomorrow in Philly, check out the panels and papers here or on Morbid Anatomy. Who wouldn’t want to sit in on sessions such as “Disease in the Middle Ages: Goiter, Lupus, and Anxiety” or hear papers like “Salvage Mission: The Lobotomized Patients of the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Psychiatric Hospital in Montreal” or talks such as “Osler and the Sanitary Movement with a Scatological Guide to Loos, Privies, and Crappers”? Wish we were going! Illustration by Marc Jean Bourgery from the John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa.
Archive for the ‘Medical Guts’ Category
Medical Marvels
Posted: Wednesday, April 27th, 2011Anatomy Freakshow!
Posted: Friday, January 21st, 2011
One of our great new neighbors here in Washington D.C. is the fabulous National Museum of Health and Medicine, a treasure trove of weird and gross bodily goodies we had the good fortune to explore yesterday. Stomach enjoyed looking at the stomach-shaped hairball trapped inside the stomach of a 12-year-old girl who ate her own hair! Kidney enjoyed looking at his diseased renal pals, suspended forever in lucite. Other highlights — the skeleton of a man with anklyosing spondylitis, a form of severe arthritis which makes your bones fuse together, who spent the last few years of his life fused to a chair; a disturbing wax recreation of a dissected infant, with placenta (I took a photo, but it’s too gross to post); and a nasty-looking leg in a giant jar! 
My toddler was more interested in pitching a fit about wanting snacks (“My brain is hunnngry, mommy!”), models of hospital ships, and touching the plastinated hearts and brains and a real human skeleton hand some of the lovely ladies who work there let us hold and touch. The museum is hosting a special Valentine’s Day program where you can make your own anatomically correct heart valentine’s, fondle real plastinated human hearts and other fun matters of the coronary. The museum is relocating in September 2011, so the next few months offer the last chance to see the museum in all its mid-century modern glory (awesome Barcelona benches, fabulous modernist brass fittings, metal san-serif fonts, etc.). Best of all — the place is not crowded and you can park — literally — in front of the museum. The specimens of fetuses with birth defects will make your skin crawl! Creepy and great!
Our Daily Meds
Posted: Tuesday, January 11th, 2011
Check out the daily doses of meds by a bunch of different post-op transplant recipients, who must take pills by the bucketload to keep their bodies from rejecting the donor organs. This here is Jaden with the medications he must take daily for the rest of this life (he had a liver transplant six months ago). Other absolutely fascinating photos posted on The Waiting List’s Facebook page.
My Plastic Heart
Posted: Friday, January 7th, 2011
Polymeric embalming turns human internal organs into a sort these sort of beef-jerky-like plastic things that can be used in medical schools and the like. These plastinated organ photos from the International Morphological Centre in Russia are pretty fascinating — who knew lungs, when dried, look so much like broccoli?
From the Archives
Posted: Friday, December 17th, 2010
Going through my old stuff has yielded some fun ye olde guts stuff from way back. That brain really needs some folds, doesn’t it? And the heart, lung and liver look so naked to me without arms. Some original drawings from my sketchbook from February 1999:
And some more…Ah, memories…
Organs at the Office
Posted: Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
These body parts are part of the campaign for Actos, a drug that controls type 2 diabetes. From left to right, that’s muscle, pancreas, liver, triglyceride, HDL-C, kidney and stomach. Check out all the crazy pharmaceutical swag available on eBay!
Hearts on the Screen
Posted: Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
There were few redeeming moments in the organ-filled thriller Repo Men, based on the novel Repossession Mambo, but they did have some pretty great-looking human-sized heart mascots (there happened to be a stripper inside one time) and lung mascots (that’s Larry the Lung to you, Jude Law uses it for subterfuge) cruising around The Union’s offices. I tried to get some screen grabs for you, but it didn’t work. Anyway, trust me, they looked great. We’re unsure whether they were the work of the movie’s costume designer, Caroline Harris, or the art director, Dan Yarhi, but we loved them along with the great cast, just not so much the far-fetched story and not-so-great pacing. Great-looking movie, but not so great to watch.
Studying Gonads
Posted: Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010
Testicle and ovary have been studying hard over at University of North Texas‘ human anatomy lab! Thanks to Cara Fisher, who is a faculty member at the school’s Health Science Center program for Cell Biology and anatomy, for these fabulous photos. Cara gave the plush ovary to her best female anatomy student and the testicle to her best male anatomy student — don’t you wish you were in her class?
Will to Pill
Posted: Friday, October 22nd, 2010
Has your doctor ever taken money from a pharmaceutical company? Now you can search for yourself. Dollars for Docs is an in-depth look into how the pharmaceutical industry persuades doctors to write prescriptions for their products. Check out this fascinating story over at NPR, which undertook this collaborative investigation with ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom, along with The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and Consumer Reports. Also visualizing our overmedicated culture is artist Jean Shin, who created this outstanding pill bottle chandelier and installation, entitled Chemical Balance.
More Than M*A*S*H
Posted: Monday, October 18th, 2010
Being an army medic must be like working in an emergency room on steroids. The chaotic lives of medics working in Iraq are brought into sharp relief by the photographs of James Natchwey, who began chronicling injuries from the war after he was injured there in 2003. This truly remarkable series of black and white pictures, called The Sacrifice, is on view at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles as part of an exhibit of incredible documentary photography called Engaged Observers. Natchwey’s photographs are striking in that they are gorgeous and utterly disturbing all at once. Shown together, they paint a devastating portrait of modern war injuries and the men and women who help heal them.
