Medical history and biography
Medicine's past can be the matter of a piece: an anatomical museum, built to teach doctors and now visited by the public, or the life of a colleague, whose convictions and work a tribute sets down.
Anatomical museums
Medical museums, with their collections of anatomical specimens, were once important instructional tools for medical students. Since the mid-20th century their use in the education of doctors has declined, but they continue to fascinate and educate the general public.
The Mütter Museum, in the Center City area of Philadelphia, has a unique collection of anatomical oddities and related artefacts and is open to the general public for a small fee, and a visitor writing in 2009 judged it one of the great anatomical museums. Thomas Dent Mütter (1811-1859), for whom it is named, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and came to be known for his surgical repair of clubfoot and cleft palate and for his early use of ether as an anaesthetic. Clubfoot (talipes equinovarus) is a congenital condition in which the person affected walks on the sides of the feet.
Mütter donated his collection of several thousand human specimens and related materials to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, along with a $30,000 endowment. In 2009 the collection included more than 20,000 objects and the museum had more than 60,000 visitors a year. The Mütter's most famous exhibits are the plaster cast of the torso of the conjoined twins Chang and Eng, along with their actual conjoined livers; a collection of 139 diverse European skulls donated by Joseph Hyrtl, a renowned Hungarian anatomist; and the giant colon of a man who had bowel movements only once a month, and whose colon contained 40 pounds of faeces at his very painful death at age 29.
Gretchen Worden, a former director of the Mütter Museum, was a tireless promoter of the museum and its artefacts. She showed off some of the museum's more entertaining artefacts in several interviews with David Letterman, and in 2002 Terry Gross interviewed her for "Fresh Air"; in 2009 the Letterman interviews were online and the Fresh Air interview was a free download from National Public Radio. Shortly after her death in 2004, the museum dedicated a new basement gallery to her memory.
Many other anatomical museums are open to the public. The National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Washington, DC, was founded in 1862 to document the effects of war wounds and disease on the human body, and it holds remains of John Wilkes Booth and of Abraham Lincoln, with the fatal bullet. The Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School in Boston was founded in 1847 by John Collins Warren, who also helped to establish the New England Journal of Medicine and served as the first dean of Harvard Medical School. Its most famous exhibit is the skull of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who survived an accident in which his head was impaled by an iron bar. The Anatomical Museum of Basel, Switzerland, founded in 1824, holds a skeleton dated to 1543 that was prepared by Andreas Vesalius, considered by many the father of human anatomy.
A reader who cannot visit can explore the museums from home through the Mütter Museum's website and through books such as Gretchen Worden's The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (Blast Books, 2002) and E. Hallam's The Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
A colleague's life: Jane Hodgson
Jane Hodgson received the Harold Swanberg Award in 1996 and died in October 2006. In the 1970s she was a respected gynaecologist in her community, and she and her husband, a surgeon, advised a community clinic that dealt mainly with reproductive health. She was concerned with the unmet medical needs of women, especially in reproductive health, and interested in the autonomy of adolescents.
She is most remembered for her strongly held view that the decision to have or to perform an abortion is highly complex and highly case-specific, a decision that ordinarily belongs within the moral purview of the people most directly involved. She performed abortions she judged ethically acceptable, even where they did not conform to the strict abortion law Minnesota had at the time, and her conviction, in a case deliberately testing that law, was vacated after the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.
She was a pioneer advocate for the medical needs of women and for greater freedom in reproductive care, but her concern for distributive justice in health care went far beyond that issue and involved her in programmes to improve health care delivery in developing nations and in underserved communities within the United States. She may have been a controversial figure, but she commanded respect, even among her opponents, for the courage of her convictions, for her willingness to argue positions rather than chant slogans, and for the breadth of her commitment to justice in health care.