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Showing posts with label pathology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pathology. Show all posts
Friday, September 26, 2014
Friday, September 26, 2014
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Exploded toads, monkey foetuses and disembowelled mice; the ingredients for a great evening! I love getting invited to places like the Royal College of Pathologists, where the walls teem with portraits of sternly bearded Victorians and the building simply reeks of centuries of accumulated knowledge. The occasion was the launch of the One Health, One Art medical art exhibition, showcasing paintings by Geoffrey Harrison (who I've previously written about) and John Gales (who I haven't).
Medical art is one of my favourite art niches. The intersection between objective, analytical science and subjective artistic interpretation gives rise to some fascinating frictions and unpredictable common grounds. This exhibition showcases precision with most of the images approaching photorealism, with a dual function as art and as an educational illustration. One tempting response to these exactingly drafted pictures is to wonder why they don't just use a photograph? One Health, One Art answers this by underlining the importance of artist as conduit, the works subtly layering in beauty, meaning and truth.
One of the most eyecatching pieces is Harrison's RVC Monkey Foetus. Shrouded in its amniotic sac, the foetus floats like a star in an inky black void. The delicate colouring renders the skin translucent, the patches of light blue and pink suggesting veins and muscles concealed just below the surface. At first glance you assume this is a human foetus, but as you spot the tail and prehensile toes your perception gradually changes. This internal shift underlines the false distinction between 'man' and 'animal', forcing the viewer to re-evaluate their ingrained response.
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| RVC Monkey Foetus |
If you'd have happened across this foetus floating in preservative in a pot you'd have gotten a taste of this process, but the tenderness and care that's gone into this rendering adds an element of love. The artist cares about his subject, and that care radiates out to us, the effect being an emotional involvement that you just wouldn't get from a photograph.
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| Anatomical land mark descriptors of the Mouse |
Crucial to this air of calmness is the lack of blood. I imagine opening up a mouse for dissection is a fiddly, messy, frustrating affair, so in this illustration we see reality sans chaos, a world of crystal clear draftsmanship and delicate pastel shades, all of which adds up to a weird beauty that you might not expect to find inside a dead rodent.
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| Top of the Stream |
I love the continuity of colour between these elements, the brown of the seal's flipper gradually blending into the grey rocks, the impact a quiet and respectful outlining of the link between organism and environment. Soon we begin to examine this scene with a forensic eye, sorting bone from rock like we're reconstructing a crime scene. This is a pretty grim landscape, but it's saved from being too morose by presence of a jaunty looking Pipet, a gentle nudge to the ribs that life carries on, even in a graveyard.
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| RVC Anatomy Dogs |
Meet Viper and Bonnie, gainfully employed as 'anatomy dogs' by the Royal Veterinary College. Living in kennels attached to the school, their job to trot out to lectures and act as living models for students. Most greyhounds don't meet pleasant ends; when they can't race their employment and their lives tend to terminate simultaneously. Fortunately the fat-free anatomy of a greyhound and their innate docile nature make them perfect teaching aids, and based on this painting, they look like happy dogs.
This painting is a ray of sunlight that pierces the morbid atmosphere of the room. It's pleasant, but as you can probably tell by now, I don't mind a bit of morbidity; as far as I'm concerned the processes of death, deformity and decomposition have as much potential for beauty as any glowing sunset or tasty bowl of fruit. What these artists do is go beyond simple representation to achieve a Herzoggian 'ecstatic truth', elevating their subjects with their imaginations, their gentle stylisations and their imagination.
If you're out and about in the West End pop down to the Royal College of Pathologists and check it out. If you like this stuff there's much much more to see. I didn't even explain the squashed toads!
Open weekdays by appointment until 30th October 2014. Royal College of Pathologists, 2 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AF.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Thursday, October 24, 2013
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| The skull of John Bellingham, unofficial mascot of St Barts |
But, as we learned last night, these centuries of accumulated knowledge came close to being lost forever, not during World War II, not during some 1930s modernist push but in the mid-2000s. Tonight's talks told us the history of this wonderful museum, and a brief exploration of the stories behind some of the more interesting pots.
Paola Domizio is Professor of Pathology Education at Queen Mary's and head honcho at the Barts Pathology Museum. She's been working in this space for years and as she speaks you sense her deeply held affection for the museum. Her talk gives us a whistle-stop tour through the history of the collection, from its 18th century origins right through to the modern day.
The genesis is the 1726 provision for a "Repository for Anatomical and Chirurgical Specimens", the first of which was a collection of bladder stones donated by Dr John Freke. As medicine began morphing into the evidence-based practice we know today, prominent doctors began keeping specimens of their most striking cases. These personal collections became a point of pride, the top medical minds competing against each other for who'd have the most comprehensive and unique catalogue.
The men that amassed these collections made huge leaps forward in medical knowledge, a prime example being Percivall Potts using the pickled scrotums of dead child chimney sweeps to correctly conclude that soot is a carcinogen. The pots that make up the bulk of the collection were amassed at around this time, medical students having free access to physical examples of the effects common Victorian diseases like syphilis and TB have on the internal anatomy of a person.
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| Barts Pathology Museum in its Victorian heyday. |
The building the collection now sits was opened in 1879 and from then until the 1930s the building was a hive of activity, a crucial resource for any budding doctor. The building just about survived the Blitz (though it came very close to being bombed to bits), though post war activity gradually declined. Still, the collection was maintained, well-frequented and lovingly curated up until the mid 90s.
Then everything changed. In 1999, following investigations by bereaved mothers, it was discovered that Alder Hey Children's Hospital had been removing and preserving body parts without consent. Understandably people were both horrified and furious. It's one thing to donate human tissue and take some small solace that your loss is medicine's gain, it's quite another to bury your child and then discover his heart is sitting in a plastic, formalin-filled container on a shelf somewhere. The knock on effect was a public backlash against pathological collections. Almost overnight their image morphed from educational resource to crude Victorian freakshow. Pathological museums were closed up and down the country, and the hardwood floors of medical schools echoed with the sound of shattering pots.
Paola explains that it's a miracle that this collection didn't get destroyed, though the museum was left to collapse into damp and destruction. The space was used as a rubbish dump for building equipment; rain falling through the walls, pots freely leaking fixative fluids onto the floor. When you're sitting within the room it's almost difficult to imagine this pleasant, tidy space descending into chaos - yet the scars are remain in cracks along the walls, the plaster having torn itself apart in obscene bulges.
After heading to the very brink of ruin the museum began a slow, tortuous process of salvage and reconstruction. The Human Tissues act 2004 codified exactly how human specimens could be kept and displayed, the rules perhaps a touch strict but at least clear. Slowly, with intense effort things began to get back in order. A prime mover in this rescue was Carla Valentine, who personally re-pots the specimens and takes responsibility for raising the museum's profile.
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| Carla Valentine (pic by Stylist Magazine) |
Carla spoke next, beginning with a Bible quote:
"I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life." - Ezekiel 37:6
This passage from Ezekiel is referring to God, a role that in Barts Pathology Museum is currently filled by Carla. In tending to the specimens she has an intimate, loving relationship with them: if Carla is putting a severed hand into a new pot, this could be first time this hand will have been held in hundreds of years. I admit that it's not very scientific to start thinking of the specimens like this - objectively they are 'merely' chunks of old meat - yet I think it's important to think of them as the surviving parts of real people with passions just like mine.
Carla's talk goes some way to 'putting breath' into the specimens, fitting them into a medical and sociological context and allowing us to consider the lives behind them. Percivall Potts' child chimney sweeps come up again, young boys forced naked into nightmare black flues, suffocating in claustrophobic, sooty misery. Even by Victorian standards it seems cruel, Potts remarking that:
"the fate of these people seems singularly hard; in their infancy, they are most frequently treated with great brutality, and almost starved with cold and hunger; they are thrust up narrow, and sometimes hot chimnies, where they are bruised, burned and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty, become peculiary liable to a noisome, painful and fatal disease."
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| Scrotal cancer on a chimney sweep. |
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| A transorbital lobotomy. |
Similarly barbaric is the procedure of lobotomy, particularly the transorbital lobotomy pioneered by Walter Freeman. Using medical tools that bore a suspicious resemblance to ice-picks (largely because they were ice-picks) he'd bend your head back, jam a needle through your eyesocket and then diddle it about inside your brain, producing unpredictable neurological damage with resultant loss of motor skills, personality transformation and memory loss. Don't worry it's perfectly safe - he practised on a load of grapefruits in his kitchen.
Freeman had no formal surgical training whatsoever, yet over four decades until the mid 1970s performed over 3,400 lobotomies, charging as little as $25 a time and performing the procedure in people's homes and in hotel rooms. He even (and I swear I'm not making this up) had a "lobotomobile" for performing the operation on the road. In examining his work a queasy trend emerges; the procedure apparently being applied to teenagers regarded as headstrong and difficult.
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| Rosemary Kennedy pre lobotomy |
Undoubtedly the most notorious lobotomy was performed on Rosemary Kennedy, sister to John and Robert Kennedy. She was scorned as a party-loving ditz whose lack of academic achievements was reflecting badly upon the illustrious family. So Joe Kennedy called up Freeman, who sedated Rose (who hadn't been told what was going to happen) and made her recite the Lord's Prayer. While she did so he beat her brain like he was making an omelette, working out when to stop by how slurred and incoherent she became. After the procedure Rose, who an hour before had been a relatively normal, fun-living young woman, spent the rest of her life incontinent, staring blankly at walls with the mental capacity of a two year old.
It's stories like these that bring the pots of Barts to life, the specimens crucial not only for education, but also as historical documentation of medical practice. It's quietly astonishing that we can stare at the immaculately preserved anatomy of a person who died over 200 years ago, the veins, muscle and bone looking as though it'd take but a slight nudge to start pumping blood through them. Stories like the scrotal cancer of the sweeps, or the visibly scrambled brains of those who underwent lobotomy become tangible when you have the physical evidence floating gently in front of you.
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| Barts Pathology Museum today. |
In terms of an educational aid the worth of this collection is clear as day. As Paola says, "you wouldn't let a car mechanic qualify who had never touched a real engine part". Specimens like these ground theory in reality, showing people directly what a spine infected with tuberculosis looks like, or the way a tumour gradually invades an organ.
Most of all, disposing of a collection like this would be a betrayal of those that gave up their bodies to create it. These pots are our shared history just as much as national treasures like the Crown Jewels or Nelson's Column - with the bonus that we can still learn much from them. I desperately hope that Barts Pathology Museum keeps being funded, and that Paola and Carla can carry on the sterling work they're doing. Who knows, perhaps one sunny autumn evening in 2208 some future space-Londoners will be staring at a piece of me floating happily in a jar. It might not be the sexiest kind of immortality, but it's at least a kind of immortality.
I highly recommend visiting. The museum is closed to the general public, but there are frequent events listed here.
Thanks to Paola, Carla and everyone else at Barts Pathology Museum for a fantastic night.
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