If you have two eyes with which to read this text, then you possess a human body and can relate to the exhibits on display at a quietly wonderful museum on Chicago’s Gold Coast.
Located in a Lake Shore Drive mansion that is itself worthy of a visit, the International Museum of Surgical Science offers a series of exhibits on medical history that are meaty but small, a welcome aspect in an era of Too Much Information.
Democrat or Republican, peasant or aristocrat, God-fearing or pagan, we all have bodies and the problems that come with them.
Pain, for example. The Jewish proverb “Not to have felt pain is not to have been human” greets us as we enter a one-room exhibit called “The Universal Condition: Enduring and Alleviating Pain.” What do belladonna, mandrake and henbane have in common? All are effective pain relievers AND deadly poisons. Very important to get the dose right. We also learn of the pain relievers marketed in mid-nineteenth-century America, most of which were opium derivatives mixed with alcohol. It’s estimated that by 1900 the U.S. was home to one million opiate addicts, which led to the enactment of the Food and Drug Act in 1906.
As you progress through the house, you gradually cease to take your body for granted.
So, using the two large appendages at the base of your spine, propel your organism to the second floor (an elevator is available for those who need it but the large and airy staircases themselves, lined by a lovely gilded balustrade, are a pleasure to behold).
On the upper floors you will encounter sights that are alternately ennobling and terrifying.
Ennobling: The Hall of Immortals, a light-flooded room with larger-than-life stone sculptures of famous figures from medical history, such as the earliest known physician, Imhotop, who hung out his shingle in Egypt around 2700 B.C.; good old Hippocrates; and Madame Curie, who I didn’t know was awarded Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, the first person every to receive prizes in two disciplines and all without a women’s movement behind her. We also meet Semmelweis, the nineteenth-century Hungarian physician whose radical new ideas on the need for cleanliness in hospitals—changing bed linens between patients, for example—earned him such excoriation that he died, outcast, in an asylum.
Terrifying: A depiction of trephination without anesthesia, in which a piece of the patient’s skull is removed to release evil spirits as treatment for headaches, insanity and other disorders.
Ennobling: The Hall of Murals, twelve enormous paintings (on wall panels, not canvas—this is a place that speaks of permanence) with scenes from medical history such as an ancient Greek anatomy lession by dissection and a battlefield surgical theater.
Terrifying: an iron lung used for the treatment of polio, which anyone over forty will recall once inflicted mostly children. Standing beside it, you can vividly imagine a child’s fear of being placed inside it for the first time.
The museum opened in 1954 as an outgrowth of the International College of Surgeons, formed to promote the exchange of surgical knowledge worldwide. Entire rooms are devoted to medical advancements in Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, Latin America and other countries, so the United-States-is-the-center-of-the-universe perspective is absent here. Wander in to the Netherlands room and you’ll find some frightful surgical tools dating from the Middle Ages, including knives and forceps used for, of all things, plastic surgery. The more things change . . .
The mansion was built in 1917 by the heiress to the Diamond Match Company, who had traveled a good deal in Europe. At her specification it was modeled on Le Petit Trianon, a relatively small house (think Lake Forest mansion) built for Marie Antoinette on the grounds of Versailles. The architect was the Chicago native Howard Van Doren Shaw, who also designed Fourth Presbyterian Church a quarter-mile south. For good reason, the house is listed on the national and state registers of historic places and is a Chicago landmark.
Those two eyes you’re using to read this? Do they require spectacles? You’re in good company, historically speaking. Invented in the thirteenth century and long before Ralph Lauren, spectacles were a sign of social status, worn only by scholars and aristocrats. We learn this and much more in a small show on the Science of Sight. Other exhibits include “Beyond Broken Bones,” a show on orthopedics and prosthetics, another on medical imaging, another on the spine. Whatever ails you.
Like lawyers, doctors are much maligned in our time, so it’s refreshing to be reminded of the inherent nobility of their profession. Visiting the Museum also engenders two thoughts, perhaps unintended on the part of its organizers. It reminds us of our mortality, not a bad thing to be reminded of, and also reminds us that, for all of our social and economic problems, we twenty-first-century Americans have it very good, with our anesthesia, sophisticated surgical tools, and clean linens.
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Marie T. Sullivan is the cultural editor for the Chicago Daily Observer.