On Monday, my Dad and I were killing time at Providence Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas*, when we noticed that the hospital had its own museum. Just down the hall from the gift shop, in a room that’s actually smaller than said gift shop, sits Providence’s collection of historic medical devices. A few of the artifacts date back to the late 1700s, but most of the stuff comes from the years between the Civil War and World War I, when the Catholic Sisters of Charity opened several hospitals around Northeast Kansas, including Providence.
Part of the museum is dedicated to examples of medicinal ingenuity—creative solutions from the time before electricity and automation. The hand-cranked centrifuge in the photo above is a nice specimen. (Oh, the cases of carpal tunnel that thing must have caused over the years.) But a large portion of the collection is given over to far more questionable medical devices …
Take this clever little DIY solution, for instance. It’s made from what appears to be baling wire, and was used in a way that is every bit as horrible as you might imagine. Here’s the placard that went with it:
Moving on …
I found this next artifact pretty interesting, from a cultural anthropology standpoint. We all know that leeches were a popular part of Western medicine. Meanwhile, I’d guess that most BoingBoing readers probably share a certain fascination with the mania for all things “modern” that swept America in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
But I did not realize that those two cultural touchstones had ever coexisted.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the Artificial Leech—the clean, sanitary, modern way to drain blood from the body of a sick person:
But wait, it gets better.
Say that you’re a 19th-century gadget-hound and chronic first adopter. To you, a simple Artificial Leech might be interesting enough, but certainly nothing to get excited about. No, you’ve got your eye on something much more cutting edge. Like, for instance, this combination blood-letter, enema-giver and stomach pump set—all packaged a classy, velvet-lined box.
According to the placard, such kits were “very rare”. Thank God.
It’s rather interesting to see the early medical obsession with flushing out your dirty bits on display like this. An amazing number of the artifacts here were meant to be stuck up urethras, or used to induce bowel movements. And, in other museums, I’ve noticed that a large percentage of patent medicines seemed to be focused on relieving constipation. It would be interesting to know how much of this was actually necessary—a lot of people weren’t eating very well back then, and diseases like cholera were rampant—and how much was simply cultural, built on ideas of what was “clean” and “unclean”.
In 150 years, what current cultural obsessions will museums like this reflect?
And, I wonder, how much of what this museum shows is based on what we think our ancestors were obsessed with, as opposed to the stuff they really spent time thinking about. I know I picked the photos I thought you’d find most interesting—which is to say, the ones that were weird and somewhat shocking. The whole museum could very well be biased in the same way. For every display case filled with various Artificial Leeches, there might be 10 boxes full of more pedestrian medical artifacts in storage someplace.
With that in mind, I want to leave you with an artifact that’s less “ew” and more “ah.” Below is an anesthetic suction machine from the 1920s, which delivered a continuous, controlled mixture of air and ether to surgery patients. My Dad thought it looked a little Steampunk in a way you all would like. But, of course, you can see that it’s clearly more early-electric punk. If such a think exists.
*My Grammy had to spend Christmas there, unfortunately. She seems to be on the mend, but I figured I better explain why, exactly, I was hanging out in a hospital. What? That’s not how you and your dad spend bonding time?