If this blog is a morning read for you, please be careful as I will fill this one with gross details about disease and deformities. Today I went to visit Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum. In the Lonely Planet guide, this was listed as one of the top five quirky museums. Seeing that it was quirky plus has something to do with medicine, I'm there! This museum was housed near the Charite Hospital, and it showcased the history of medicine in Germany as well as the collection of odd, gross, and disgusting specimen that Rudolf Virchow collected. This was Body World plus 8. The museum spanned three floors. The first showcased a history of the important people in German medicine. As I read through the summaries of their lives and achievements (which were numerous and impressive given the times that they lived in...who knew that they did surgeries way back when in the 1800s, lots of screaming patients with no anesethia :( ), I commented, where were the women??? As I looked around at the paintings, there were only two women in all the rows of important figures. They appeared much later and were ridiculed. For example, while one woman who did work on starch in urine was presenting her work, her male colleagues joked that she probably dropped her powder in the chamber pot.
Second floor housed a large collections of jars, tissue sections, and skeletons (like I said, Body World to the extreme). Each system of the body, each organ was represented. Want to see a super hypertrophied heart, a cirrhotic liver or how about a grotesque tumor? It was all there and up for display. However, the grossest samples were by far: a huge colon... (size of me), deformed fetuses, or personally for me feet in jars that were infected with some sort of fungi (unattractive to the max).
Third floor housed medical equipment and their history. The older microscopes and the blood pressure cuffs were intricate and very vintage (hahaha). I especially enjoyed the display about modern medicine and medical research: pipets, tips, petri dishes, cell culture media... stuff I have not seen since forever (when I changed media for my cells this morning).
Hope it was not too gross and if you want to see more gross pictures, just ask. I figured one would be enough.
LILY
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