Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, thank you so much for coming here!
You've just had a tour behind the scenes of the Mütter Museum.
[Lindsey] I have, yeah.
[Anna] And this is after your wonderful talk, your inaugural book launch for The Butchering Art
which we've had here at The College of Physicians, the Mütter Museum.
And now that you've kind of seen some things behind the scenes, do you have any feelings
you want to share with us?
[Lindsey] We're standing here in the Bone Room.
It just blows my mind how much stuff you guys have.
You know, I have a lot of back problems and just standing here right now, I have a lot
of pain, and I notice that you have some spines that make me feel a little bit better about
my own overall health.
[Anna] Yeah!I think that's one of the takeaways a lot of people have in the museum in general is
they look at the specimen and are like "I have that" or "I had that," and of course
you know a lot of these are mid-19th century or even earlier
so you're looking at things that people died of.
Simple things like fractures or a lot of these right are Pott's Disease, so tuberculosis
so there's a lot of back problems going on.
[Lindsey] And people would've lived with that for quite a long time.
[Anna] Such a long time!
They had to live long enough for the spinal column to literally implode and collapse in
on itself from the weakening.
[Lindsey] And when did death come, shortly after those deformities set in?
So you live for 10, 20 years with your back that crooked?
[Anna] You really could.
Tuberculosis, when people think tuberculosis they automatically just think "lungs," but
no, the longer you live with it, the more pervasive it'll get.
It'll get into your skeletal system, it'll invade your whole body.
[Lindsey] Not just the spines?
Some other parts of the skeleton?
[Anna] Absolutely. Think about it, because it weakens the bones, any load-bearing bones will actually start--
so the hips, the pelvis--and that can cause osteomalacia, and that's deadly to any woman who tried to
give birth if you have a malformed pelvis.
We have quite a few of these casts on display, too, and that was basically a death sentence.
[Lindsey] When you see a skeleton, can you know right off the bat it's tuberculosis or
is it difficult sometimes to determine?
[Anna] Sometimes it is.
[Lindsey] I mean, obviously when it's a really extreme deformity, you can determine that.
[Anna] Unfortunately, there's a lot of diseases that can weaken, so if I'm looking at a whole
skeleton articulated, sometimes it's hard to tell, is it rickets?
[Lindsey] So there are a lot of diseases in those periods that created these kinds of deformities.
[Anna] Yes, and of course you lived with them.
[Lindsey] And a huge amount of the population would've had to live with them and it affected
their working ability as well.
[Anna] Absolutely.
[Lindsey] People forget about that.
In my book, The Butchering Art, I talk a lot about the fact that if you came in with a
compound fracture and you had to have an amputation, it could be your livelihood at stake.
And so what Joseph Lister does with carbolic acid and antisepsis is he's saving not only
people's lives, but their ability to work and to provide for themselves.
This is all really important, things that we don't think about in the 21st century.
[Anna] Exactly.
And one of the things that struck me in your talk that really resonated with me, looking
at the collection, is how many of them were force to kind of pre-pay for their burials.
[Lindsey] Yes, in the hospitals.
Can you imagine today if they said "We need some money upfront for that?"
[Anna] What was that quote that you had that one doctor said to the patient?
[Lindsey] He came into her house to remove her breast without any anesthetic
showed her the knife, and said to prepare her soul for death.
I can't imagine a surgeon saying that today.
But of course it was sort of a humane thing to do, to be upfront that you might not pull
through the surgery because so many patients did.
In that particular case, she did pull through it and she wrote about it, and that's how
we know about it.
[Anna] And that's one of the things we have to try to tell the public is that we're just
inherently looking at this situation through our 21st century eyes.
And what I love about your book is that it really tries to steer you into the mindset
and the frame of that time period, so we really have to take ourselves out of our current
contextual situation and try to place ourselves there, and we try to do the same thing here
with our aesthetic and the way we present the collection.
That's why I'm so glad that you could come here.
[Lindsey] Thank you so much.
I'm sure that there's this sense of "is it too much?"
Is it too in-your-face?
And there's been a little bit about that with my book as well, but I feel like
if you're going to pick up a book about Victorian surgery, you need to know what it smelled like
it felt like, everything about that.
And the descriptions that I'm talking about in the book are contemporary descriptions to Lister's time
These are not my words, this is how people felt about it.
And here, too, more than any collection in the world, I feel tells us that we owe a huge
debt to the medical men and women of the past to get to the point where we are in the 21st century
and reminds us that we are very lucky to live today.
And looking at this, can you tell me a little bit about this?
Because I find this fascinating.
[Anna] This is a wonderful specimen, it's not just bone.
It is actually a combination of bone, skin, blood vessels, organs.
This is a very unique type of preparation.
Some people might call it a "proto-plastinate" or a "corrosional-type" type of specimen,
and this dates way back to the time of John Hunter.
You have to remember that back then, there was no refrigeration.
I mean all the dissection classes in med school were done in the winter, preferably up high.
And then the body just started rotting and that was it.
So, they devised this way to preserve the parts of the body.
And they did this by a combination of injecting the major vessels with this wonderful solution
of arsenic, wax, dyes, mercury, lead.
[Lindsey] This is not something you want to touch too much.
[Anna] Not without gloves, so that's why I'm kind of going like this.
And also, they retained some of the nerves and the sinews and the muscles and the skin
with this method called a corrosion.
So what you do is you inject the blood vessels with this material and it hardens
and then you put a corrosive substance around the body, with each the way much of the soft fleshy tissue
and then also a desiccation or drying method will dry some of it out.
And then finally, they do like a kind of varnish, and that's what gives it its unique aroma.
But this is from the early 1800's and it has survived.
There's no metal articulations like you would have with a skeleton, this is all using soft
tissue to articulate, and it's just an absolutely wonderful specimen that showcases a lot of
anatomical features and this was a teaching specimen.
[Lindsey] Yes, and I was going to say, this was so important because at this point
bodies were hard to come by.
You had body snatchers working in digging up these bodies
so this was really important for the medical students.
When you get into Lister's time, there's more personal dissection, there are more bodies
available because the laws start to change, but this would've been really important in the earlier period
[Anna] And you can see this hanging in the professor's classroom or amphitheater.
where they might even have a fresh body here, but they could still point to the anatomical features.
Or maybe they used this in summertime for additional lessons
but this was just recently taken off display.
We had this on display for decades and, again, one of the things I always stress is this
museum was initially created as a teaching museum for doctors
and it's still a teaching museum, but our demographic has changed.
Now the vast majority of the 175,000 people who come in here every year have no medical background
so we have to present the collection in a different way, but the mission has always
been teaching and always will be teaching.
[Lindsey] And that's amazing.
People can come in here and learn about the body and they don't have to be in the medical profession
and you're opening the doors to something that they wouldn't have access to.
And what I find amazing is that the eyelashes are still there!
[Anna] The art and the craftsmanship that went into this anatomical specimen is just
absolutely astounding.
And we have other ones, too, I mean like our wonderful Beauchêne exploded skull.
The artistry, the mount--we could talk on and on, but I know--
[Lindsey] It could go on and on.
Anna, we have to come back and do it again.
[Anna] We have to!
[Lindsey] And you gotta come on to Under the Knife, my YouTube channel.
[Anna] I'd love to, that would be so much fun!
[Lindsey] More.
Wait for it.
[Anna] More to come, thank you so much.
[Lindsey] Thank you so much.
And thank you!
[Anna] Until next time.
[Lindsey] Until next time.
[Anna] Thanks!