Mercy!

January 12, 2010

New Jersey Lawmakers Pass Medical Marijuana Bill

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

TRENTON — The New Jersey Legislature approved a measure on Monday that would make the state the 14th in the nation, but one of the few on the East Coast, to legalize the use of marijuana to help patients with chronic illnesses.

The measure — which would allow patients diagnosed with severe illnesses like cancer, AIDS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis to have access to marijuana grown and distributed through state-monitored dispensaries — was passed by the General Assembly and State Senate on the final day of the legislative session.

Gov. Jon S. Corzine has said he would sign it into law before leaving office next Tuesday. Supporters said that within nine months, patients with a prescription for marijuana from their doctors should be able to obtain it at one of six locations.

“It’s nice to finally see a day when democracy helps heal people,” said Charles Kwiatkowski, 38, one of dozens of patients who rallied at the State House before the vote and broke into applause when the lawmakers approved the measure.

Mr. Kwiatkowski, of Hazlet, N.J., who has multiple sclerosis, said his doctors have recommended marijuana to treat neuralgia, which causes him to lose the feeling and the use of his right arm and shoulders. “The M.S. Society has shown that this drug will help slow the progression of my disease. Why would I want to use anything else?”

January 12, 2010

Second Opinion

Facing End-of-Life Talks, Doctors Choose to Wait

By DENISE GRADY

It’s a conversation that most people dread, doctors and patients alike. The cancer is terminal, time is short, and tough decisions loom — about accepting treatment or rejecting it, and choosing where and how to die.

When is the right time — if there is one — to bring up these painful issues with someone who is terminally ill?

Guidelines for doctors say the discussion should begin when a patient has a year or less to live. That way, patients and their families can plan whether they want to do everything possible to stay alive, or to avoid respirators, resuscitation, additional chemotherapy and the web of tubes, needles, pumps and other machines that often accompany death in the hospital.

But many doctors, e

specially older ones and specialists, say they would postpone those conversations, according to a study published onlineMonday in the journal Cancer.

It’s not entirely clear whether these doctors are remiss for not speaking up — or whether the guidelines are unrealistic. Advice that sounds good on paper may be no match for the emotions on both sides when it comes to facing patients and their families and admitting that it will soon be over, that all medicine can offer is a bit of comfort while the patient waits to die.

Dr. Nancy L. Keating, the first author of the study and an associate professor of medicine and health care policy at Harvard, said not much was known about how, when or even if doctors were having these difficult talks with dying patients. But she said that her research team suspected that communication was falling short, because studies have shown that even though most people want to die at home, most wind up dying in the hospital.

The researchers surveyed 4,074 doctors who took care of cancer patients, instructing them to imagine one who had only four to six months left, but was still feeling well. Then the doctors were asked when they would discuss the prognosis, whether th

e patient wanted resuscitation or hospice care, and where he or she wanted to die.

The results came as a surprise: the doctors were even more reluctant to ask certain questions than the researchers had expected. Although 65 percent said they would talk about the prognosis “now,” far fewer would discuss the other issues at the same time: resuscitation, 44 percent; hospice, 26 percent; site of death, 21 percent. Instead, most of the doctors said they would rather wait until the patients felt worse or there were no more cancer treatments to offer.

They were not asked for their reasoning, but Dr. Keating offered several possibilities. One is that doctors may disagree with the guidelines, which are based on expert opinion rather than data.

“Or they may not be

comfortable discussing it,” she said. “These conversations are time-consuming and difficult. Some doctors may feel patients will lose hope. It’s easier to say, ‘Let’s try another round of chemotherapy,’ instead of having a heart-to-heart discussion.” Training may also be a factor, Dr. Keating said. Medical schools spend more time on end-of-life issues than they did in the past, and the greater willingness of younger doctors to broach the subject may reflect that change.

Dr. Daniel Laheru, an associate professor at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in pancreatic and colorectal cancers, said he was not surprised by the study.

“The natural tendency is not to provide more information about this than you have to,” he said. “It’s such an uncomfortable conversation and it takes such a long time to do it right.”

He added, “People come to us with hope, and if you kind of yank that away from them right away, it’s very

unsettling.”

A terminal diagnosis plus the grim details of “do not resuscitate” orders and hospice care may be too much for a patient to hear in one day. Dr. Laheru said he tried to prepare patients on their first visit for the idea that during later visits they would discuss different possible outcomes.

“They don’t always hear that part,” he said.

Dr. John Boockvar, a neurosurgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center who treats many patients with malignant brain tumors, said he favored postponing such discussions until the end was drawing close. During his own late father’s illness with leukemia, he said, his family was upset by an oncologist who brought up end-of-life issues early.

“As a patient and a family member, I don’t know if I would have wanted to hear a doctor say, ‘In 18 months we’ll be dealing with hospic

e or end-of-life discussions — do you want to have that discussion now?’ ” Dr. Boockvar said. “I don’t know what the emotional benefit is to the family. I don’t think it’s been studied.”

As a doctor treating patients who are terminally ill, he went on, he did not hesitate to discuss end-of-life issues. But he said, “As the time approaches, there’s usually ample time.”

But Dr. David R. Hilden, an internist at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, is not so sure.

“I think many of us wait until there’s just a few weeks left and then you have no choice,” he said. “It’s going to happen in a week or two, and they’re in the hospital and they’re on their last legs. The time to talk is much earlier.”

Without planning, Dr. Hilden said, dying patients may wind up in exactly the situation they dreaded most, tethered

to machines in a hospital instead of being kept comfortable at home in their own beds.

“This last week, I had a patient with prostate cancer and end-stage heart disease, who probably has less than a year,” he said. “I talked to him and his wife. ‘How do you want your remaining days to be? How much do you want us to do?’ He and his wife were very receptive. Many patients appreciate it. We had a good conversation. It’s easier when the patient is older and it’s not entirely unexpected. He’s 86.”

The patient said he did not want tubes or machines, but just wanted to be comfortable for his last few months.

“They were at peace with it,” Dr. Hilden said, adding that many patients who get aggressive treatment for advanced cancer might in retrospect have made a different choice.

“They might say: ‘After that last three or four months of radiation and chemotherapy, I’m sick, I’m nauseated, my hair fell out and it didn’t extend my life. I might not have done it if I’d known, if I had had the chance.’ ”

Dr. Keating agreed, saying she thought that often when terminally ill patients choose to continue chemotherapy, they don’t understand its limits.

“They say, ‘I want to do e

verything,’ and they mean ‘everything to cure me,’ ” she said. “They don’t understand it’s not curative.”

Despite the difficulties, she went on, doctors should level with their patients.

“When you know someone’s going to die of their disease, it’s only fair to the patients to help them understand that,” Dr. Keating said. “But these conversations are very challenging. Figuring out how to do it well — it’s so tricky. It’s definitely not something everybody believes in.”

January 12, 2010

At

a Mighty 104, Gone While Still Going Strong

By MANNY FERNANDEZ and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

Joe Rollino once lifted 475 pounds. He used neither his arms nor his legs but, reportedly, his teeth. With just one finger he raised up 635 pounds; with his back he moved 3,200. He bit down on quarters to bend them with his thumb.

People called him the Great Joe Rollino, the Mighty Joe Rollino and even the World’s

Strongest Man, and what did it matter if at least one of those people was Mr. Rollino himself.

On Monday morning, Mr. Rollino went for a walk in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a daily routine. It was part of the Great Joe Rollino’s greatest feat, a display of physical dexterity and stamina so subtle that it revealed itself only if you happened to ask him his date of birth: March 19, 1905. He was 104 years old and counting.

A few minutes before 7 a.m., as Mr. Rollino was crossing Bay Ridge Parkway at 13th Avenue, a 1999 Ford Windstar minivan struck him. The police said he suffered fractures to his pelvis, chest, ribs and face, as well as head trauma. Unconscious, he was taken to Lutheran Medical Center, where he later died.

New York is a city of extraordinary lives and events, and here, indisputably, was one of them — one of the city’s strongest and oldest, struck down on a Monday morning by a minivan in Brooklyn.

“Pound for pound, in the feats that he practiced, he was one of the greatest performing strongmen we’ve ever had, if the lifts he’s credited with are accurate,” said Terry Todd, a co-director of the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas, who knew Mr. Rollino for more than four decades. “He certainly wasn’t one of the strongest all-time strongmen, because of his size. To ask a well-trained 130-pound man if he can lift what a well-trained 400-pound man can lift is asking an unreasonable question. But for his size, Joe was apparently one of the strongest men who ever lived.”

Mr. Rollino stayed away from meat. And cigarettes. And alcohol. He said he walked five miles every morning, rain or shine. At the height of his career, he weighed between 125 and 150 pounds and stood about 5-foot-5.

He was a teenager when he watched Jack Dempsey knock out Jess Willard in 1919. He later boxed under the name Kid Dundee, became a Coney Island performer, worked as a longshoreman, fought in World War II and had a bit part in “On the Waterfront” that never made the film, not necessarily in that order.

Among his many accomplishments, Mr. Rollino was proudest of one in particular. “My finger strength,” he told an interviewer for ESPN The Magazine. “Six hundred thirty-five pounds. See the size of it. At 150 pounds, nobody ever beat me in this world.”

He was a legend within that small Coney Island society in which few New Yorkers would want to become known as legends: the men and women who swim in the Atlantic when it is at its harshest and coldest. On a 6-degree day in January 1974, Mr. Rollino and six other members of the Iceberg Athletic Club swam into the waters off Coney Island. The freezing Atlantic was like steel: It didn’t intimidate him.

“People told me he holds the record for swimming every day for eight years,” said Louis Scarcella, 59, a former homicide detective and a member of the city’s oldest winter swimming club, the Coney Island Polar Bear Club. “He was known as the Great Joe Rollino, and he was great. You knew he was great just by standing next to him. He just had that humble confidence and strength. It shined.”

Mr. Scarcella, like many of those who knew Mr. Rollino, has a Joe Rollino story, or several Joe Rollino stories. And though some of them can be neither confirmed nor refuted, they get told and retold and told again, because they are too good not to. Mr. Scarcella heard that one winter in the 1950s, Mr. Rollino recovered the bodies of two people who drowned in Prospect Park, because the police did not have the necessary protective equipment and it was too cold for anyone else to jump in and bring them to the surface.

Mr. Rollino was a longtime member of the Association of Oldetime Barbell and Strongmen. Dennis Rogers, a fellow member and a professional strongman, remembered seeing him at the association’s annual dinner in June, at a hotel near the Newark airport. “He just came in to say hi to everybody and coached some of the guys that were performing,” said Mr. Rogers, who in 1995 prevented four motorcycles from moving at full throttle for 12 seconds, according to his Web site. “He would regularly work out in the gym. He was in pretty good shape. He walked a little slow but looked fine.”

Mr. Rollino had lately been living in Brooklyn with a niece, in a house on 14th Avenue, about a block from where the accident occurred. The driver of the minivan that struck Mr. Rollino, a 54-year-old woman who lives in the neighborhood and who remained at the scene, was not charged. She received a summons for having a defective horn, and the police said that neither speed nor alcohol was a factor. Mr. Rollino had been walking about 40 feet from the nearest crosswalk when the minivan hit him, according to the authorities.

Old photographs of Mr. Rollino are displayed in several neighborhood shops. People called him Puggy. “If he shook your hand, he’d break it,” said James Romeo, owner of Romeo Brothers Meats and Foods on 15th Avenue. “He wasn’t feeble.”

Charles Denson, a historian and the author of “Coney Island: Lost and Found,” first met Mr. Rollino at his 103rd birthday party at a neighborhood restaurant. “He was one of the last links to the old strongman days of Coney Island,” he said. “Coney Island was the training ground for strongmen. He was one of the best.”

Mr. Rollino wowed the crowd at the party, Mr. Denson recalled. He told stories about the old days, of course, but he was more than just talk, even at 103. Mr. Rollino put a quarter in his teeth. Then he bent it.

My Teaching Philosophy

“If we believe that writing is social, shouldn’t the system of circulation – the paths that the writing takes – extend beyond and around the single path from student to teacher?”

-- Kathleen Blake Yancey

The problem with the traditional one-to-one tutorial model is not only its lack of sustainability in an age when the writing public is engaged with new technologies and the genres they’ve created, but that it runs counter to the idea that, since writing is social and takes myriad paths in its circulation, we should prepare our students to enter a writing public in the post-academic community. In truth, the one-dimensional student-teacher circuit is ill equipped for this.

For me, escaping the insularity of a single human relationship, my critique and the student’s response, has come through my embrace of a collaborative learning model. Displacing the teacher-student draft and revision process with a variety of workshop models that foster peer critique and encouragement, expands the possibility of teachable moments in a way that valorizes the idea of writing as a social activity.

As a teacher, I argue that the strict writer-teacher relationship intrinsic to traditional critical approaches to writing, as much as it can nourish effective writing, also runs the risk of discouraging students. What I’ve found is that the way I was taught to write; the head scratching encounter with organizing my ideas and getting them on paper; the returned essay with the teacher’s marginal remarks, “No transition,” “Analyze don’t summarize,” “Pronoun agreement”; and the red sea of criticism, simply validated my ineptitude. For many students the message is clear: they can’t write. What’s often missing in the one-to-one paradigm is an affective aspect that complements the analytical components of writing. Yes, rules, order, sequence, and structure are key to writing a meaningful essay, but the energy and spirit that makes a good paper is a matter of emotion as well as logic. Eliciting the students’ engagement with the feelings that swirl around the issues we ask them to engage with comes easiest when the forum is public, meaning the workshop-focused classroom. When the students feel it, they get it. And their capacity to feel arises out of the ebb and flow of consensus and dissensus that comes with collaborative discussion.

Inter-social activity inevitably has an emotional valence. I’ve found that the students’ confidence in knowing something, and writing about it, comes with their having a passion, an enthusiasm, for what they’re investigating. As such, I encourage an atmosphere of intellectual camaraderie that begins with an emphasis on our shared humanness. A self-critical understanding that they must first understand how they feel about something before they can theorize on why they feel as they do. This opens the way for investigating how language is an articulation of these feelings, and why one rhetorical approach is more effective than another.

As often as my students hear me talk about starting an essay with a compelling question as a thesis prompt toward their analyses, it is only at that point when they read a piece that begins with a straightforward rhetorical query (Would you assist your mother’s suicide if she were dying? What would you do if your sibling married someone of the same sex? Would you fire your maid if she were an illegal immigrant?), or come up with a complicated question of their own (when a student recently posed the question of whether it’s fair that athletes at the University of Michigan be allowed to register first for classes, the students erupted in response to the gravity of her question), that they understand what I’m trying to convey.

This emotional component of writing, however, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires an emphasis on shifting the responsibility for unpacking the ideas we discuss onto the students. Having a workshop based class facilitates this. The idea of ceding intellectual control to the students may seem threatening to some, but the benefits in doing so far outweigh the risks. The idea that having the students counsel each other is like the “blind leading the blinding” can be mitigated by the workshop guide I provide, as well as our discussions about recurring patterns of mistakes and how to address them. It is inevitable that students will use the passive voice, err in agreement, and cite the dictionary rather than defining their terms through logic and example. But discussions in the workshop setting, that space where students learn through a collaborative dialogue with their peers, concretize those lessons in ways that my appeals to theoretical principles and their practical applications could never provide.

As a teacher, a central goal of mine is to encourage the generation of ideas. When I first came to graduate study, a highly esteemed professor admonished us (His course assistants) to never let the students in on what we were thinking. But as I began to teach, I realized that discouraging intellectual risk in my students, and eschewing pedagogical improvisation on my own part, made for a dull and uninspiring class period. My best teachers inspired me to take chances and embrace freethinking, and that is what I aspire to in the classroom. I encourage my students to air their thoughts, no matter how outlandish they may be, and am unabashed about sharing what I know and what I don’t know. For better or for worse, transparency is at the heart of my teaching method. In aiming to demythologize both the text and myself, my goal is to have the students be true to their convictions, but always with the caveat that they know why they believe as they do. My task is to have the students think for themselves, see their peers’ thought processes, and to collaborate with each other in understanding the variety of ways that ideas evolve.

Over the course of the semester I try to stay focused on a few key themes, and workshops have proven ideal to convey this emphasis. Grammar, and its myriad applications, is always under discussion. A second concern is the relationship between a topic and the ideas it might generate. Early in the semester we attend to what constitutes a constructive idea for a paper. Is a particular issue significant enough to merit a five to seven page essay? If not, might that topic give way to other, more specific and compelling, ideas worthy of scholarly consideration. This usually dovetails into a discussion on strategies for expanding on an idea: we might brainstorm a topic toward the absurd, for example, and then pull back and compare our limit with the subject at hand; or, as a way of better understanding a general concept, create a group of sub-headings that tease out the discrete components of an idea; or examine how a new idea can be formulated within our own questions and findings, which, when effective, can be as convincing, or more so, than the research and investigations that provide the source of our queries.

A question that never leaves me is this: am I really able to teach the students how to write? Certainly I can provide the rules, mechanics, and such, but teach them how to write? Who knows? What I can impart to them are ways to look at writing outside of their comfort zone, and offer ways to pose questions that pique their own curiosity as well as the interest of others. I can also inspire them by example, through my own passion for knowledge, and by ceaselessly encouraging their efforts. Perhaps I can’t teach them how to write, but in having them understand the distinction between critical thought and idle speculation, and fostering their progress in improving on how they articulate an idea, my hope is that they will use these skills above and beyond our time together.

"Wet Dogs, Rhubarb bars, and Relaxing After a Long Day" -- Mikey

“Someone said that God gave us

memory so that we might have roses in December.”

-- J. M. Barrie 1860-1937: Rectorial Address at St. Andrew’s, 3 May 1922

They say a sign of depression is when you cry by yourself. But what if it’s not your fault? Blame it on the bitter winds of winter, or failure of selective memory, or collapse of those denial mechanisms once thought inexhaustible. Perhaps it’s the realization the inexhaustible always ends.

The Nuns preached self-control because there is no other kind. What I didn’t get then, is that the concept of “God’s Will” was code for man’s having none. Being young, and at the self-delusional axis of an egocentric universe, I mistook the focus on self-maintenance as an ideological attempt to indoctrinate me with the myth that my autonomy was a threat. And further, that that threat was a form of power. Come to find out, the one threatened most was always myself. That ubiquitous self-help cliché concerning “being one’s own worst enemy” has its origins in the Biblical injunction to “do unto others.”

I suspect Twain had these things in mind when he scolded us that what we see as man’s most noble and sublime quality, the capacity to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, can also be seen as our “primal curse.” Unlike all other animals we can choose to be cruel, greedy, avaricious, and inhumane. Think about it, in general, wouldn’t you say your dog, cat, or parakeet treats itself better than you do?

The issues here are about autonomy and choice late in the game.

The holidays always bring out the worst in me. In Melville's purview, we’re all fast fish, and loose fish, too. If this is true, when the night draws nigh, is it we that determine when our last run is done. Having recently described myself as having a “last run” in me, does this mean that God sets the drag? Is “control” an obsolete metaphor? Is the dualism of control and submission fatally flawed?

A friend recently told me he was running out of time to keep running away. Sister Patience looked good once -- under that habit of youth -- but as a memory, she doesn’t age well. Patience requires time, and that’s a non-renewable existential resource.

Melville may have been speaking of autonomy versus fate, but his words also apply to the ways we meet our end. I’m happy-sad of late. And why shouldn’t I be when I see myself, and those closest, whither toward late winter.

And so my friend, at the end of our, “long day,“ when the senses fail, and the meaning wavers, we’ll both take comfort in memories of those who love us.

-- Randy

Merry Christmas

Dear All:

They say that all good writing begins with a passion for it. I’m sitting here stoned, gouty, and itchy, and I’m supposed to get crazy about this. What I have noticed is that anything of interest is autobiographical, and that most of us can’t achieve the necessary distance to sort out the chaos of our own lives. I certainly can’t.

Take for instance my childhood. My Catholic upbringing would seem a rich vein of self-reflection. But I can’t really describe the depth of how twisted it has left me. Those authors that truly approach the depraved sensibility my past evokes would seem too much to some. My friend and office mate gave me a compendium of Ivan Brunetti’s work that exactly touched my most decadent sensibilities. His comics unleashed my inner hysteric. The book is “Misery Loves Company.” I was going to try and describe it, but doing so would risk alienating even my most loyal supporters.

For you action movie, science-fiction fans, here’s my 4 minute + Xmas video card: go to youtube, search terms = Ataque de Panicol (Panic Attack!) 2009 by Fede Alvarez. Speaking of New age greetings, many thanks to Sudsy and Nancy for the Bob Dylan Xmas card.

I’m still sitting here…time to go to B.s for bone-in rib roast. But not before stopping at Frenchs to borrow some gout medicine.

Merry Christmas - Randy

Happy Birthday to Me! (and Ludwig Van)

Happy Birthday to me…and Ludwig Van…

Happy Birthday to me…and Ludwig Van…

Happy Birthday dear Randy…and Ludwig Van…

Happy Birthday to me…and Ludwig Van.

-- Randy Tessier (2009)

“No phallic hero, no matter what he

does to himself or another to prove

his courage, ever matches the solitary,

existential courage of the woman who

gives birth.”

-- Andrea Dworkin 1946 - : “Our Blood’ (1976)

“Contraception should be used on all conceivable occasions.”

-- Spike Milligan 1918 - : “The Last Goon Show of All” (1972)

"Only a fool would celebrate getting older."

-- Oscar Wilde

Finally, what our children think of us having them (see below).

Forever Always Ends

“She brought forth her firstborn son,

and wrapped him in swaddling

clothes, and laid him in a manger;

because there was no room for them

in the inn.”

Bible: St. Luke

I’m sure I’ve mentioned my aversion to the holidays. All that phony peace on earth and goodwill towards men baloney is enough to make the staunchest hypocrite blanch. Couple that with a football and gluttony fest thinly disguised by a nativity myth and you’ve got one sick holiday.

But seriously, getting and spending just ain’t what it used to be. How can you spend when you ain’t got? All that stimulus horsecrap can only work when the pig getting stimulated spreads the wealth, and you know that ain’t gonna happen, cause that’s a, whaddaya you call it? Oh yea, SOCIALISM! The Obamans’ plan was to have the fat cats share the wealth after the bailout trickled up from us taxpayers. So what’s the result of the corporate rescues and economic stimulus: lowered credit limits and escalating interest rates across the board. Nice. Oh well, at least the arms merchants are making money off of the war. That’s capitalism. It’s good?

Survival of the richest.

What happens when masses of people need food?

Unemployment, Swine flu, erectile dysfunction, foreclosures, rising prices, cancer, you name it, there’s always something to sway our attention from global warming. I say this in reference to the Polar bear.

The way Glenn and I see it is like this. Time passes, the earth changes, animals come and go, man is a part of that big picture, and the Polar bears’ inevitable extinction is a part of the universe’s natural process.

A fine thing it is when a guy steals your shoes at Christmas. I’d bought em’ on 8^th avenue and only had em’ a month when they went missing. Wouldn’t have thought much about em’ were it not for seeing that scene in “Treasure of Sierra Madre” where the guys caught wearing Dobsy’s shoes after killing him on the trail. It’s about how the winds of envy and greed ultimately blow out the pilot light of character, the movie, that is.

Merry Christmas - Randy

Los Pishtacos

“We acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We were wrong. We were terribly wrong.”

-- Robert McNamara 1916 – 2008: speaking in Washington, just before the twentieth anniversary of the American withdrawal from Vietnam, April 1995

It’s a cold and windy day. The 50’s brick ranch with original windows just doesn’t cut it when it’s below 30. Haven’t written in a while and I’m not feeling it now. Saw the liver doc yesterday. He confirmed my feeling that it’s an abused, but still functional, organ. He asked, and I consented, to take the cure. My only request was that I begin the regimen in the spring, which will allow me to take my medicine, so to speak, in the teaching off-season and warm weather.

B. and I traveled to Philadelphia over the weekend of November 19. On Saturday we went to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia's Mutter Museum. Here’s some stuff on that:

Our History

In 1858, Thomas Dent Mütter, retired Professor of Surgery at Jefferson Medical College , presented his personal collection of unique anatomic and pathological materials to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia . Our collection now boasts over 20,000 unforgettable objects. These include fluid-preserved anatomical and pathological specimens; skeletal and dried specimens, medical instruments and apparati; anatomical and pathological models in plaster, wax, papier-mâché, and plastic; memorabilia of famous scientists and physicians; medical illustrations, photographs, prints, and portraits. In addition, we offer changing exhibits on a variety of medical and historical topics.

Our Treasures

Our one-of-a-kind treasures include:

• The plaster cast of the torso of world-famous Siamese Twins, Chang & Eng, and their conjoined livers
• Joseph Hyrtl's collection of skulls
• Preserved body of the "Soap Lady"
• Collection of 2,000 objects extracted from people's throats
• Cancerous growth removed from President Grover Cleveland
• Tallest skeleton on display in North America

This place was way cool. What isn’t mentioned above is their collection of shrunken heads. Too much! You’re looking at a shrunken human head. R.J., you would love this

joint.

A shrunken head is a severed and specially prepared human head that is used for trophy, ritual, or trade purposes.

Most known shrunken heads were manufactured either by indigenous peoples in Melanesia and the Amazon Basin, or by European or Euro-Americans attempting to recreate the practice. In Amazonia, the only people known to have shrunk human heads are the Shuar, Achuar, Huambisa and Aguaruna, collectively classified as the Jivaroan peoples of Ecuador and Peru. Among the Shuar, a shrunken head is known as a tsantsa.

The process of creating a shrunken head begins with removing the skull from the head. An incision is made on the back of the neck and all the skin and flesh is removed from the cranium. Red seeds are placed underneath the eyelids and the eyelids are sewn shut. The mouth is held together with three palm pins. Fat from the flesh of the head is removed. The flesh is then boiled in water that has been steeped with a number of herbs containing tannins. It is then dried with hot rocks and sand, while molding it to retain its human feature. The skin is then rubbed down with charcoal ash. The lips are sewn shut, and various decorative beads are added to the head.

In the headshrinking tradition, it is believed that coating the skin in ash keeps the musiak, or avenging soul, from seeping out.

Shrunken heads are known for their mandibular prognathism, facial distortion and shrinkage of the lateral sides of the forehead; these are artifacts of the shrinking process.

Among the Shuar and Achuar, the reduction of the heads was followed by a series of feasts centered on important rituals.

The practice of preparing shrunken heads originally had religious significance; shrinking the head of an enemy was believed to harness the spirit of that enemy and compel him to serve the shrinker. It was said to prevent the soul from avenging his death.^[4]

Shuar believed in the existence of three fundamental spirits:

• Wakani - innate to humans thus surviving their death.
• Arutam - literally "vision" or "power", protects humans from a violent death.
• Muisak - vengeful spirit, which surfaces when an arutam spirit-carrying person is murdered.

To block the last spirit from using its powers, they decided to sever their enemies' heads and shrink them. The process also served as a way of warning those enemies. Even with these uses, the owner of the trophy did not keep it for long. Many heads were later used in religious ceremonies and feasts that celebrated the victories of the tribe. Accounts vary as to whether the heads would be discarded or stored.

Those damn South Americans are always up to something shocking. Check this story out:

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 11/20/09

LIMA, Peru (AP) — A gang in the remote Peruvian jungle has been killing people for their fat, the police said Thursday, accusing the gang’s members of draining fat from bodies and selling it on the black market for use in cosmetics.

He said the suspects, two of whom were arrested carrying bottles of liquid fat, told the police it was worth $60,000 a gallon.

Police officials suspect that the fat was sold to cosmetic companies in Europe, he said he could not confirm any sales.

At a news conference, the police showed reporters two bottles of fat recovered from the suspects and a photo of the rotting head of a 27-year-old man.

The gang would cut off its victims’ heads, arms and legs, remove the organs, and then suspend the torsos from hooks above candles that warmed the flesh as the fat dripped into tubs below.

The band’s fugitive leader had been killing people to extract fat for more than three decades.

The police had received a tip four months ago that human fat from the jungle was being sold in Lima. In August, police officers infiltrated the gang and later obtained some of the amber fluid, which a police lab confirmed as human fat.

The suspects were arrested in a Lima bus station with a quart of human fat in a soda bottle.

I suppose I should talk about the war (can you say Obama’s folly?).

I’m too lazy, so here’s some excerpts from Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed piece in the 12/01/ 09 New York Times:

“After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option."

"It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole."

"More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.”

“Politicians are seldom honest when they talk publicly about warfare. Lyndon Johnson knew in the spring of 1965, as he made plans for the first big expansion of U.S. forces in Vietnam, that there was no upside to the war."s

"A recent Bill Moyers program on PBS played audio tapes of Johnson on which he could be heard telling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “Not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 [American troops] are going to end that war.

McNamara replies, 'That’s right.'”

Nothing like those sentiments were conveyed to the public as Johnson and McNamara jacked up the draft and started feeding young American boys and men into the Vietnam meat grinder.”

Happy Holidays - Randy