Macabre museum in Cape Town

2005-12-02 10:46

Johannes de Viliers

Cape Town - Without skin we are all equally ugly.

In the new Museum for Medical and Morphological Sciences, one of only three of its kind in the world, are skinless heads, chests, legs, in fact, literally every part of the human body.

However, what makes this museum special, are the examples of pathologies which were removed from corpses and even live patients, said Dr Ben Page, anatomy and hystology specialist among the perspex boxes containing body parts on Wednesday.

The museum on the campus of the health sciences faculty of the University of Stellenbosch, includes sensational exhibits: babies born without brains, a bladder containing a cancerous growth, the remains of lungs destroyed by asbestosis, a liver with a hole in it in which a tapeworm had made itself at home, gall-stones the size of buckshot, and a piece of tattooed skin.

Unique museum

Many universities boast anatomy museums, said Page, but the sick body parts make this one unique. The only other comparable museums are the Huntington Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.

The museum consists of three floors, including a number of rooms where the body parts are prepared.

Mostly these are taken from cadavers - the bodies of people who had died as a result of disease at Tygerberg Hospital, and whose families never retrieved the bodies.

The cadavers are treated with balming liquid shortly after death. Twenty to 40 litres of the liquid are injected into the arteries to sterilise them and to stop further decomposition.

The suitable body parts are eventually removed and stored in formalin, in which it can theoretically remain unchanged for hundreds of years.

Museum gives important information

The samples range from a whole chest from which the skin has been removed, to tiny ossicles and tympanic bones removed from somebody's ear.

Medical students visit the museum to see what the organs look like three-dimensionally ("if a doctor does an incision for the first time, he must know how deep to cut") as well as art students who sketch the body parts, and pupils on school trips.

Page said the exhibits helped stimulate pupils' interest in medical science, but only Grade 11 and 12 pupils were allowed. And even among these older children he might send one out who starts giggling - usually an early sign of hysterics.

- Die Burger