We’ve just passed by the amputation kits, some still awash in dried blood, and we’ve glanced in at the ancient trepans used by Incans to punch holes in their skulls to relieve headaches.
There are also panels depicting a Turkish bloodletting, an Indian woman about to have a nose job with her legs tied to posts in the ground, and some 19th-century medical students washing blood and gunk off their arms and hands. One of the more graphic murals is of a cesarean section circa 1844, a procedure that was normally performed by midwives more interested in saving the baby than the mother.
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Van Deman, the first professional director hired for the museum, has been on the job about a year, and he’s still getting to know the 15,000 objects on display in its 27 rooms. Some of the more impressive items include one of the seven original death masks of Napoleon; the first “artificial heart,” which was really a perfusion pump created by Charles Lindbergh in 1935 to keep animal tissue alive; and South America’s first X-ray machine, a large contraption that looks like it came out of a 1940s science fiction movie.
Despite the current controversy, Van Deman says, the museum, which gets lots of foreign visitors and tourists, doesn’t get many local walk-ins. “I’d like to change that,” he says. During the afternoon of my visit, only two other people stopped by the museum–a couple from Tinley Park who had come to Chicago for a day of fun.
The College of Surgeons opened the museum in 1953, three years after they moved into the building. When Van Deman was hired a year ago, his first project was to go through the collection with a fine-tooth comb, cataloging everything; his current project is cleaning up and organizing the pharmacy. His five-year plan is to boost the budget from its current $100,000 to at least $500,000 and to add an additional five or six full-time staff members. He’s already secured a grant of $1,500 from the Illinois Department of Tourism to help produce the museum’s first brochure, a slick book that will be distributed by the state.
“Surgery,” he notes, “really refers to the hands. It was a craft of the hands. You still have a distinction in Great Britain today where they call surgeons ‘mister’ and physicians ‘doctor.’ But here, surgeons are higher paid and are held up to a high level of esteem. It takes more years in the U.S. to be a surgeon than a physician.”
