Das Berliner Medizinhistorische Museum

Today I went to the Berliner Medizinhistorische Museum, in the spirit of the grotesque. My timing was good because there is a show about the history of German dentistry, with lots of alarming antique dentures and pliers. I also checked out the Pathological Museum, a collection within the main museum, of anatomical specimens. There was also an exhibit both from a patient's and a medical point of view, explaining the hospital treatments of various patients over the centuries of Charité Hospital's existence, from a pregnant woman giving birth (she was a prostitute, and the hospital was originally for the poor and for soldiers, and care was provided by doctors in training to be military surgeons), to a 20th century man who received a liver transplant.

As is usually the case with me, I was most absorbed not by the actual bodies before my eyes, and there were many, whole and partial, in the pathology exhibition, but by the medical furniture and accoutrements, which tend to give a hint about the value, and possibly the aura, that these equipment and procedures held for doctors and patients. The birthing chair, a giant rough wooden throne with a half circle notch in the seat and two stones, presumably to rest feet on, on the floor below was pretty amazing, as were the delicate silver handles on antique toothbrushes and the velvet-lined cases of dental instruments.