OC: International Museum of Surgical Science

Decided to take a trip down to the big city to check this place out. Small museum but lots of neat stuff about the history of medical advancements. But there’s a lot of neat dark history behind the rejection of things we commonly accept today. Ignaz Semmelweis was an obstetrician that found that if he washed his hands and tools before delivering babies he reduced the “childbed fever” mortality rate from 10% to 1%. But at the time germ theory wasn’t a thing so all his contemporaries called it “balderdash, pure balderdash”. He had a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum where he died two weeks later after a vicious beating from the guards. Tough luck being born before actual evidence-based science, dumbass. Hey, check this shit out.

That is a bladder stone the size of a bread roll at a Greek restaurant. Who knows how many people touched that. There was also an ancient Roman catheter made of copper, and you know they probably didn’t do more than spit on the tip before jamming it up your dickhole. The special lady friend was mostly taking Snapchats and she didn’t give two tin shits about the x-ray exhibit where there was some big as shit x-ray tubes. Thomas Edison’s lab assistant got skin cancer for fucking around with x-rays without protection. So he went with x-ray therapy to cure his cancer. It went badly. He was certainly no Thomas Edison in the brains department.

Here’s a display of all the red yarn you have in your body, with some of the blue yarn that holds your gut meats together. If you look in close you can see this dude was packing some huge red wiener meats before he died of skeletal sickness.

You know when this box opens, some shit is going to go down. Prior to the mid-19th century, amputations were done without anesthesia so surgeons were all about getting it over with. One dude whose name escapes me held the record for quickest amputation at 35 seconds. In the process, he also sliced off the other dude’s left nut which apparently didn’t disqualify him. But in the early 19th century, nitrous oxide and ether were around but used for recreational purposes. A dentist named Horace Wells noted during one of these huff parties a dude broke his fucking leg and gave zero shits that day. So he tried using nitrous before tooth removals. Everything was so going so well he brought it to a Boston hospital to show off his new innovation to the dentistry community. But the one fucking time he doesn’t use enough nitrous the patient yells out and the whole crowd yelled “humbug” which was old tymey for “bullshit” because it isn’t until Deadwood Season 1 that you could casually call a person a cocksucker in casual conversation. Meanwhile, a former business partner named William Morton and his Harvard professor Dr. Jackson got the bright idea of doing the same thing only with ether. Ether at the time was a better inhalant for surgical anesthesia, and while Morton was the first to come up with this idea he was the first to try to patent it under the name Letheon after it was successfully demonstrated in removing both teeth and tumors. Problem was, you can’t patent ether so everyone thought Morton was an asshole. Plus you had Jackson and Wells trying to claim credit, so it went nowhere. Morton died of a stroke and never got rich off the ether innovation. Neither did Dr. Jackson, an even bigger dickface who tried to claim credit for the idea even those his only contribution was being next to Morton and having access to either because medical students huffed that shit all the time since they had shit tons of it. This wasn’t the first time he would pull shit like this and even had the stones to claim he invented the telegraph before Samuel Morse. We all know how that went, and Jackson died in an asylum.

As for Wells, chloroform seemed to be the up and coming knockout drug of choice (ether stuck around as it was harder to overdose on). So he did some self-experimentation. That landed him in the Tombs in New York for trying to throw sulfuric acid at prostitutes completely fucked up on chloroform. He committed suicide in his cell at 35 by slitting his wrists, having used chloroform beforehand. Happy Fucking Halloween.

This was in a notebook near an exhibit. I zeroed in on this and made my feelings known. Sorry so messy. Whatever, dicks. If you didn’t want to learn anything why aren’t you at the Bean like every other jackoff day tripper. Oh right, it’s cold and windy as shit out. It was a free day and this book was across from an exhibit about trepanning with hole filled skulls. Incan trepanning devices that looked like giant arrowheads for punching a fucking hole in your skull along with some little ones for scooping out the skull fragments without trying to make too big of a mess. You climbed up to the 4th floor and was disappointed they didn’t have an IMAX theatre so you could sit down for 40 minutes and continue to not learn anything? I guess the only thing left is to suck my big fat red yarn dick.