Peter Ross at large: Slice of life in museum of death

Published on Saturday 12 September 2009 19:47

A cancerous hand resembles a starfish. Calcifications of the urinary tract glisten like polished gemstones. Tapeworms in a jar resemble fancy pasta

'AND this," says Marianne Smith, breezy as any tour guide, "is a gangrenous foot". Smith, dressed in a neat black suit, her hair neatly bobbed, is the librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Having worked here for more than 20 years, she is well placed to show me around the pathology museum.

Outside, on Nicholson Street, it's lunchtime and people are busy eating, gossiping, enjoying the warmth, betting at the bookie's and buying theatre tickets. In other words, going about the sometimes pleasurable business of being alive.

Most passers-by will be unaware that just a few hundred feet away, behind pillars and portico, there is this place of stillness, a dead zone where, for more than 200 years, vital parts of the human body have floated placidly in jars and been contemplated dispassionately by great surgical intellects. The pathology museum is where hearts meet minds.

It has been open to the public since 2005 but is not exactly hoaching. During the Festival it was visited by around 150 people each day. Not much for a museum in the centre of the city at the height of the tourist season. Understandable, though. Between stand-up comedy shows, if it's a toss-up between a nice gin 'n' tonic and peering at a pancreas sliced thin as prosciutto, the booze is likely to prove more tempting.

For the afternoon I spend in the museum, I mostly have the place to myself. It's very quiet, so when a gulch-deep American voice booms out, it's hard not to eavesdrop. "Is this Burke's skeleton?" asks John Landis, the director of American Werewolf in London and Michael Jackson's Thriller video. He's here, in the company of Edinburgh University lecturer Owen Dudley Edwards, to research a film he's making about Burke and Hare, the infamous bodysnatchers.

The museum's first "conservator" was Robert Knox, a surgeon who between 1827 and 1828 accepted as anatomical specimens the bodies of people whom Burke and Hare had killed. Burke was eventually hanged and dissected in public, and the museum collection includes a pocket book made from his skin. He was also made into wallets and satchels. The guy had a lot of personal baggage.

With its white walls, drawn blinds and symmetry, the museum is a calm space with an ambience somewhere between a gallery, a hospital ward and a boutique. The exhibits are arranged within bays and sorted by body part or illness. Down this bay it's all skulls, down that all hands and feet. Third aisle on the right for aneurysms, please.

The specimens are preserved within clear containers full of formalin. Sometimes, without the labels, it would be hard to tell what they were. The mind grasps for metaphors. An orange cancerous hand resembles a starfish. Calcifications of the urinary tract glisten like polished gemstones. Tapeworms looped in a long jar could be mistaken for the sort of fancy pasta sold in a high-end deli.

Sometimes it's only too obvious what things are. There's part of the face of a soldier killed during the First World War. Sliced away just above the eyebrows and just below his moustache, he looks as though he might be peering through a letterbox.

Exhibits like that make the museum, at times, quite challenging. Visitors have been known to faint or cry. Aware of these sensitivities, the curators have closed off the upper gallery. The items there, which can be viewed only with special permission, include stillborn foetal abnormalities. "Babes in jars," Marianne Smith calls them. "One of them is a large conjoined twin and a small conjoined twin, and the arm of one is round the other. It's really quite an emotional thing."

How odd, how sad, to think of those babies floating there, out of the womb and into the formalin, since the 1800s. I wonder how long their mother lived without them? If she was from Edinburgh, did she know that they had been preserved like that, perhaps not too far from her home? These days, retention of human tissue can result in a scandal like Alder Hey, but back then morality was different. Whatever surgeons removed seemed to be theirs to keep.

On the day following my appointment at the museum, I was to attend the funeral of a close relative, and, briefly, I pondered the wisdom of visiting such a place in such a week. Would it be upsetting? Well, no. The pathology museum bears the same relation to personal grief as a bird skull does to a flock of crows – one is static, sculptural, blank; the other raucous, turbulent and dark. You can stare for a long time at a stilled heart and it doesn't look like anyone you know.

Most of the specimens are anonymous. They are labelled with the name of the surgeon who donated them, but the people from whom they were plucked are lost in the shadows. These days it's a confidentiality issue, I suppose, and back then it probably wasn't thought important to keep a proper record. But I can't help feeling that it would give these people some posthumous dignity and significance if we knew who they were and something about their lives and deaths.

Of course, there's a counter-argument. In one large jar there is an arm and hand, severed at the elbow in 1931, once part of a man from West Lothian whose job was to mine shale as a source of paraffin oil. He developed dermatitis, an occupational hazard, which turned cancerous. The man is nameless but his arm is vivid. There are hairs on it and grime under the fingernails; it looks like it was once muscular. It's the limb of a hard worker, a man who did a dirty and dangerous job to provide for his family, and somehow, being anonymous, it stands for all exploited workers who sicken or get injured on the job. Really, the fist should be clenched with pride.

The collection is based largely on specimens gathered by the surgeons John Barclay and Charles Bell, who acquired them as teaching aids.

There are portraits of Barclay, Bell and their fellows all over the Royal College. These men are serious and dignified, deft of mind and hand. They could be colourful, too, though. James Syme, who died in 1870, was known as "the Napoleon of surgery" and was said to have "never wasted a word or a drop of blood".

In 1828, Syme removed from the mouth of one Robert Penman a gigantic tumour which distended his jaw like Desperate Dan. He did it in just 24 minutes, spilled only 250ml of the man's blood, and his patient lived to a grand old age despite having gone through the procedure without anaesthetic.

Another interesting Edinburgh surgeon was Alexander Wood (1725-1807), known, on account of his great height, as "Lang Sandy Wood". He went on his rounds accompanied by a tame raven and a sheep, which is the sort of home visit from the doctor that I'm sure we all miss, and was the first person in the city to carry an umbrella. He once treated Robert Burns for a sore knee.

Charles Bell had artistic as well as surgical talent. In 1809 he tended the wounds of troops returning from the Battle of Corunna, sketching their injuries and then later working them up as the oil paintings. In one, a bare-chested soldier looks down at the wound in his left arm. Bell, having poked a finger into the hole and felt splintered bone, decided to amputate, and now the soldier's humerus is displayed beside the portrait.

Elsewhere, there's a dramatic portrait by Bell of a naked soldier, suffering the agonies of tetanus, having been shot in the head with a musket ball. Naked, his spine is arched fit to break, his teeth grind together, his toes are curled and his eyes bulge. These paintings were intended as study aids to illustrate particular injuries, but they have an emotional power and raw style not unlike the work of William Blake.

The pathology museum is housed in a gallery designed by William Playfair, the architect who also created the Royal Scottish Academy building on the Mound, and there is certainly some crossover here between art and science. Creative people have responded strongly to the museum. Ian Rankin set parts of his Rebus novels here, and a book, Surgeons' Hall: A Museum Anthology, published later this month, will include contributions from the poets Edwin Morgan and Kathleen Jamie.

Not everyone has such sophisticated responses, of course. There's always a danger that the pathology museum is treated like a freak show. As the afternoon wears on, the quiet is disturbed by the arrival of a school group – neddy teens in baggy sportswear.

"There's actually, like, heids here," says one girl.

"Ye think that's bad?" asks a boy. "There's sumdae's brains and everything o'er here."

"And," exclaims another lad, regarding a pair of cancerous testicles, "check oot this guy's baws!"

It's an annoying way to carry on, and it's as well that they can't get upstairs to the twins, but, in a way, it's good to hear the raised voices and the cheek. It sounds like life, and after several hours among the dead, it's time to get back to that. Edinburgh is sunny and the heat on my back feels good. That gangrenous foot, that cancerous arm, the unknown soldier's letterboxed face, and all those hundreds of other strange pale lonely objects in their city-centre limbo will never again feel the sun.

In the visitor's book someone has written, "I'm glad I'm alive now rather than back then." And you know what? They're dead right.