London Medical College – 9′ Skeleton from America
Medical and surgical progress in all parts of the world is one of the most gratifying features in the making of history. Those pessimists who were wont to declare that new industries and “the feverish haste of modern life” were producing new diseases at a greater rate than could be coped with, have not been borne out by the facts as revealed by statisticians. For this we have to thank new scientific achievements showing that just as in war the methods of defense have developed more rapidly than those of offense and lowered the mortality of combat, so have new methods in surgery and medicine lowered the general mortality.
The work of science has become more systematic. For example, there was recently opened in London a medical museum. The collection exhibited is weird, yet in some respects amusing, while its chief value consists in the fact that the medical student of the period is given access to material beyond the reach of the expert of a few years ago. A table laden with jawbones shows clearly how horses or kangaroos may have toothache very badly; examples of surgery show how natives use banana fiber bandages; object lessons in the construction of ring-tailed lemurs, three-toed sloths, Mexican crocodiles, giraffes, blesboks, frogs, and seals, while an exhibition of the brain of the Australian mudfish shows that creature to be much more intelligent than might be suspected from his habits or appearance, and last, though by no means least, the skeleton of an American giant who, when alive, must have stood about nine feet high.
All of which may cause the lay mind to wonder wherein consists its value in the matter of saving human life, but the scientist knows that so complex is his art there is no biological phenomenon that has not its bearing upon the study of man, and that the healing of humans owes much to comparative biology.
- Ashland tidings., August 04, 1913, Page PAGE SIX, Image 6