Urology Museum

Urology Museum

Fascinating museum dedicated to the under-appreciated medical history of urology features some wince-inducing devices

It wasn’t long a go that a kidney stone was a life threatening affair.

Among the historical figures who suffered from bladder stones were Napoleon Bonaparte, Peter the Great, Louis XIV, Oliver Cromwel, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and famous diarist Samuel Pepys, who after surviving the operation to remove the stone – an operation that often killed those who underwent it – celebrated the occasion every year with a huge feast.

Benjamin Franklin and his brother both suffered from the stones, and Franklin fashioned a silver catheter for himself to help relieve the pain. The power of one who could successfully remove the stone was great. It is believed that Frère Jacques Beaulieu – a famous French “lithotomist” or one who removed gallstones – name lives on in the French children’s song “Frère Jacques.”

That appreciation carried on into modern times. It was a a Gilded Age entrepreneur who funded the John Hopkins Brady Urological Institute after being successfully treated for gallstones.

Today Gallstones are treated regularly and with little fanfare. With new techniques, surgery isn’t necessary and the stones can be broken up with sound waves. The William P. Didusch Center for Urologic History located in the American Urological Association’s headquarters – still closely tied with the John Hopkins Brady Urological Institute – celebrates this and many other breakthroughs in urology.

Started not by a doctor, but by William P. Didusch a medical illustrator who focused in urology, the museum contains most of Didusch’s original drawings, as well as an impressive instrument collection, including hundreds of urological scopes, most important among them the collection of nearly 600 cystoscopes.

The Cystoscope, an instrument inserted into the urethra and used by urologists to see the inside of the bladder and urethra, was a revolution in Urology. It allowed doctors to diagnose patients without performing surgery to see what the problem was. However, it is not without some sympathetic wincing that one views the older, and larger of the Cystoscopes.

The museum also keeps a collection of urology related historical medical texts, among them the pamphlet aptly named “Pisse-Prophet.”

Besides the cystoscopes, among the most curious items in the urological collection are walking canes that held secret catheters, a collection of more than 30 microscopes dating back to the 1700’s, and an enormous “pineapple sized” bladder stone.

The museum has rotating exhibits which have included “Sexuality: Perception and Performance Throughout History” which displayed a jade phallus, anti-masturbation devices (a ring with spikes on the inside) and penile silicone implants from the 1980s, “Fad, Fraud, Future? Quackery and Nostrums in Urology” and “Remedies and Recipes” about historical treatments for urological ailments. Many of the items from past exhibits can still be seen on display.

Viewing the collection is free but by appointment only.

Warren Anatomical Museum

“Mortui Vivos Docent; The Dead Teach the Living.” So said Dr. John Collins Warren. Like many medical men of his day, Dr. Warren collected anatomical and pathological specimens to help in his studies. After his retirement in 1847, he left his excellent collection of unusual anatomical and pathological specimens to Harvard University. While the collection is said to contain some 15,00 specimens, only a handful are on display to the public. Exhibited in four rather uninspired display cases on the 5th floor of the Countway Library are a few incredible specimens.

Included in the museum is the phrenological collection of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, including a cast of Spurzheim’s own skull, the Dr. W. T. G. Morton ether inhaler used in the first ether assisted surgery, a pair of conjoined fetal skeletons, papier-maché anatomical models of eyes by Azoux and a beautiful Beauchene or “exploded” skull.

Without question, the most well known, and perhaps most curious, item in the collection is the skull of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had a 13-pound tamping iron blown through his head and lived to tell the tale. Gage’s altered personality after the incident helped doctors begin to understand the localized nature of personality and identity.

Museé Fragonard : Strange French Medical Museum

Museé Fragonard

The only remaining collection of flayed figures made by French “madman” Honoré Fragonard

Founded in 1766, the Fragonard Museum is one of the oldest museums in France. Honoré Fragonard was one of the first medical masters of France, and his extensive collection contains rooms devoted to anatomy and terratology, articulated animal skeletons, and to disease and pathology. The highlight of this extraordinary museum is by far, however, the écorchés, or “flayed figures” of Honoré Fragonard.

Fragonard was appointed by Louis XV to be a professor at the first veterinary school in Lyon, and it was there where he began working on his “flayed figures.” These écorchés were carefully dissected animals which were posed and mounted using a secret process. While many of his contemporaries were creating artificial anatomy models of wax, ceramic and plaster, Fragonard spent years preparing hundreds of these écorchés through a very difficult and, to this day, secret process similar to that of plastinisation. Though most of the items were intended to be used as educational tools, some his work is purely artistic.

Fragonard worked in Lyon for six years before his flayed figures began frightening the townspeople. Fragonard was declared a madman and fired. This did not deter him, and he continued to make hundreds of his magnificent écorchés to sell privately. While Fragonard created over seven hundred écorchés in his life, the collection at the Fragonard Museum contains only twenty one écorchés: the last of the remaining haunting and whimsical flayed figures of Honoré Fragonard.

Be sure not to miss (it would be hard to) the écorché of the Horseman of the Apocalypse. Inspired by painter Albrecht Dürer’s famous picture of a man riding his horse, Fragonard made Dürer’s vision a disturbing, skinless, three dimensional reality.