Today, I am here to talk to you about two other forms of body modification:
tattooing and piercing.
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Tattooing is a very old form of body modification dating back at least 5200 years
with the discovery of Ötzi the Iceman, whose body was found in the northern Alps in Italy.
His body was covered in 61 different tattoos, which researchers believe were used as a form of pain therapy.
The act of tattooing itself is inserting a pigment through the epidermis,
which is the outer layer of skin, into the dermis, which is the lower level of skin.
The dermis holds on to that pigment permanently.
When the ink is placed in the dermis, your body thinks it's some sort of pathogen or invader,
and it floods the area with white blood cells to protect you from infection.
These white blood cells are called "macrophages." Ask anybody who's ever had a tattoo done,
they get red and swollen and hot. And that is your body trying to fight infection.
These macrophages will literally engulf the ink particle to protect you from it,
and they will sit there under your skin indefinitely.
So the next time you look at a tattoo, just know you're looking at it through a series of white blood cells.
Sometimes these white blood cells will get reabsorbed back into the bloodstream,
and that's why older tattoos can fade.
The reasons behind tattooing are varied, as are the designs that have been created throughout time.
Some cultures use tattoos for religious protection from bad luck.
Some use tattooing as a form of cultural identity.
Some use tattooing as a form of showing off their strength and virility.
And yet others get tattoos simply because they like them.
Tattooing today has many different meanings throughout the world
and many different instruments have been used to perform tattooing.
The instrument that most people are familiar with today is the tattoo machine,
which uses an electromagnetic current to make the needle move back and forth throughout the machine.
The tattoo instrument that I have on the table is a stick that was used in Thailand
to create tattoos in more of a stick-and-poke fashion.
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An often-related form of body modification is piercing, which is the act of
piercing or puncturing or cutting the skin to insert a piece of jewelry.
The oldest known piercing comes from Australia in the form of a kangaroo bone
that was used to presumably pierce the septum of the nose.
When they carbon-dated this kangaroo bone, it was dated to be 44,000 years old.
So we can only guess that we've been piercing our bodies as long as we've been around.
The piercing that I have on the table today is a lip plate that was used by the Mursi people of southern Ethiopia.
In this particular tribe, the young ladies have their lower lip pierced around the age of 16,
and this is done as a form of cultural identity, but also as a sign of maturity
that they are no longer girls, but they have become women.
The lower lip will be pierced right about here, and then over the course of several weeks,
months, years, it will get stretched into a larger and larger shape.
Into the piercing, they insert a piece of clay or wood that has been carved into a similar shape like this.
And these plugs are left in the piercing all the time except for eating and sleeping.
This particular plate is about 3 1/4 inches, and
I'm guessing it's probably an intermediate phase-sized piercing, as some of them can get quite large.
If you like what you see and you're an educator, please visit our website at www.muttermuseum.org
to see the list of available Mütter Lessons
that you can sign up for to enhance your group visit to the Mütter Museum.