by Bart King
Using these heads, the medical students will practice the surgical procedures that they will one day perform on living decapitated heads.
Without Pus We Wouldn’t Have Pustules!
White blood cells, or leukocytes, are your first line of defense against bacteria and other germs. They’re like gang members cruising your bloodstream, looking for trouble. If the white blood cells find a germ, they gang up on the organism and a brawl breaks out.
Your white blood cells try to eat the germ, and of course the germ fights back. In the course of battle, some of your white blood cells are killed. Poor little fellers! Their dead bodies form a liquid we call pus. This is sort of cool when you think about it. Your pus comes from your own dead soldiers!
Wait, that’s not right! Gross lab is where medical students learn all about human anatomy, and in order to do so, they cut apart and examine dead human bodies, or cadavers. The cadavers are all people who have volunteered their bodies to science. As the beginning students get started, they are often paired off with each other and given an entire body to work with. The first thing the students do is roll the body onto its stomach. That way, cutting up the body seems less personal, and it also makes it easier for students to get used to touching a dead body.
Rolling the body over and seeing its face is always a jolt. But within a couple of days, the students have cut their person down to size with bone saws and very sharp instruments. It takes an hour of sawing and chiseling to remove the top of the skull. Students say that when the skullcap comes off, it sounds like a big piece of Velcro being torn. And they say the brain feels kind of like a water balloon filled with gelatin.
Bad Dog! Give Mommy the Nose!
An Italian woman named Loredana Romano was once dissected by her poodle.
But don’t worry, this story has a happy ending!
Romano’s dog was named Vale, and Vale was allowed to jump into Romano’s bed. But one day everything went horribly wrong. After the dog jumped into bed with her, Romano reported that Vale “suddenly bit off my nose.”
Afterward, Vale ran off with the nose. Italian police officers chased the dog around Romano’s garden until they finally retrieved the nose, which doctors reattached to Romano’s face. The dog was forgiven. Clearly, Vale had been curious to see how easily a nose could come off someone’s face. (Answer: pretty easily.)
But Vale is NOT allowed up on the bed anymore. (So I guess I was wrong. The story doesn’t have a happy ending after all!)
Although today’s doctors are very well informed, for most of human history, people had no clear ideas about what was inside the body. And since almost everyone had rules against dissecting humans, our learning curve has been pretty slow. There was one brief historical period when the ban on dissections was lifted, and Herophilus of Alexandria (335–280 BCE) took full advantage of it. There was just one catch: Herophilus preferred to dissect living people. (This is called vivisection.) He may have cut open as many as six hundred lucky prisoners who involuntarily donated their bodies to science.
So is Herophilus remembered as a mass-murdering mad scientist? Puh-leeze! Don’t dis the man known as the “Father of Anatomy.”
But open season on human dissections ended pretty fast, and from then on, doctors pursuing knowledge had to pursue dead bodies in secret. As you can imagine, this hobby completely freaked people out. These doctors were known as body snatchers! Ghouls! Grave robbers!
As a public relations move, the good doctors invented a different word for what they were doing: resurrectionists! No dice. Even executioners had better reputations than doctors who were interested in anatomy.
A successful grave robber’s worst enemy was time. In a world without refrigeration, bodies decomposed quickly. In fact, as with sports like baseball or basketball, dissection had a “season”: the cold months when bodies would keep for a longer period!
In response to grave robbers, coffin-makers came up with a number of techniques to prevent the theft of bodies. Here are three of my favorites:
The Mortsafe: Imagine a combination of a coffin and a safe, complete with a reinforced door and a combination lock.
The Nesting Coffin: In this scenario, a grave robber would open a coffin, only to find another coffin inside. Getting THAT coffin open would reveal . . . yet another coffin! (By this time, the frustrated grave robber would leave in disgust.)
Corpse Straps: The body is lowered into the coffin and then strapped into place with several metal straps.
The most famous body snatcher was a man named William Burke. After selling a corpse to a doctor, Burke decided to skip the distasteful “digging up graves” part of the job. It seemed easier just to murder people instead, and so that’s what he did. Sixteen times! After being caught, convicted, and hung, Burke’s body was used for—wait for it—dissection. His skeleton is still in Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons.
“Gross, Dude!” Hall of Fame
William Harvey (1578–1657) published groundbreaking books on the human circulatory system. How did he learn so much about the topic? Lots of dissections, including ones on his sister and father!
Relics!
Have you ever seen a professional basketball player fling his jersey (or headband) into the stands at the end of a game? Fans go crazy! They lunge for the sweat-soaked clothing like it was a precious garment from on high.
While we might call that headband a souvenir today, in another time, it might have been called a “relic.” But whatever you call it, the desire to get something that once belonged to a celebrity is a strong one. In the old days, any part of a noteworthy person’s body or belongings was considered valuable. This was especially true of saints and other holy people.
Even the whole body of the famous person could be the relic that people wanted.
Let me give you an example. John the Baptist is a famous Christian figure who had his head chopped off. And if you’re looking for John’s head today, you can find it in TWO places: Istanbul and Damascus! You can see the problem. These types of relics are often fake, but that hasn’t stopped people from wanting them.
In the thirteenth century, an Englishman named Hugh of Lincoln was in charge of building a new church. In order to give his church some street cred, Hugh was anxious to get his hands on a relic. So he went to a monastery in France where the arm of Mary Magdelene was supposedly kept in a casket. (Why did they have her arm? It was a relic!)
When Hugh saw the arm, he was overcome with devotion. He leaned into the casket to kiss the relic. And with his head in there, he opened his jaw and BIT a piece of Mary’s leathery arm off! His plan was to return home with the mouthful of Mary to use as his own church’s relic. But he was caught! Man, was he in trouble.
Hugh was allowed to speak in his own defense, and he said that if Catholics eat communion wafers, and if communion were believed to be part of God, why couldn’t he take a bite out of a mere saint? While this may sound like a stretch to you, it convinced Hugh’s captors. They let him go, and he took with him his piece of the relic.
The bodies of certain saints, like that of St. Francis Xavier, were cut up into various pieces to serve as relics in far-flung churches. Some holy people made plans before their death to help make this happen. Before the Buddha died, he charged a monk to go through his cremated remains and save anything that was salvageable (ashes, bone, teeth) to spread among the faithful.
Now that’s thoughtfulness!
Belly Buttons
As far as I can tell, belly buttons were invented so that lint would have a place to hang out. Scientists have studied belly button lint (seriously), and here are some results of their very important research:
Belly button lint is composed of dust, dried sweat, fat, dead skin, and bits of cotton.
These items usually gather around the belly button before being drawn into it.
The hairs near the belly button grow in circles around it. This helps direct bits of lint into it.
People with hairless bellies col
lect much less lint than those with hairy ones.
The person most likely to have a ton of gunk in his belly button is a fat, middle-aged hairy man. (And that’s only the second-grossest thing in this chapter.)
Graham’s Crackers
A man named Graham Barker has collected his belly button lint in jars since 1984.
To get the inside story on your belly button, we have to go back to when you were in your mother’s womb. There wasn’t any air to breathe in there! So all of your oxygen went through the umbilical cord that connected to the spot where your belly button is now. (This cord also brought you nutrition and carried away some of your waste.)
In other words, you “breathed” through the hole where your belly button is today!
After you were born, the doctor cut your umbilical cord. This means that your belly button is the first scar you ever got, left over from your first surgery! So if you see a woman showing off her belly button with a short blouse or top, you can politely remind her that it’s actually a scar. (I’m sure she’ll appreciate the thought.)
Don’t They Teach Kids Anything?
Paramedics responded to a 911 call made by a thirteen-year-old boy. He reported that his guts were falling out! When the paramedics got to him, the boy told them that “stuff” was coming out of his belly button. This “stuff” was belly button lint.
When a person is seated, their belly skin may fold over their belly button. It depends on whether or not the person is overweight. If the belly button is constantly folded under a crease of fat, then it’s going to be warm, dark, and moist most of the time. This can lead to a yeasty fungus infection! When this happens, the belly button gets a cheesy, moldy substance in it. A common form of this infection is called candida fungi, which is the same thing that gives babies diaper rash.
But extremely overweight people can get infections anywhere their flesh is hanging. There are plenty of horror stories about the yeasty skin infections hiding in the gigantic skin flaps of obese people. And I’m not going to tell you any of them! Now go get some exercise.
The Appendix: As Useful as a Screen Door on a Submarine
The appendix usually comes at the end of a book, but I was born a rebel, so I’m putting it here. (Ah, book humor.)
But what about the human appendix? If you were to take a voyage into your stomach, through your small intestine, and onward into your big intestine, you’d have two thoughts:
First, you’d wonder what you’re doing in your own digestive system. (Never mind that!)
Next, you’d wonder about a duct you’d see in the side of the large intestine. See it? It’s the one discharging stinky greenish-yellow fluid. Does this horrible liquid help digest food? Nope. Does this discharge have any use at all?
Nope.
Welcome to the world of your appendix! It’s just a dead-end tube coming off your large intestine. And it makes stinky, useless fluid. Oh, and it’s also dangerous. The appendix can get infected, fill with pus, and begin to swell up in a painful condition known as appendicitis. A swollen appendix isn’t removed, it will burst and release infected grossness into the body. This is NOT good, and if not treated immediately, it can lead to MAJOR problems. (FYI, a common warning sign of appendicitis is a pain around the belly button. This pain then shifts to the lower-right side of the body and is very tender.)
Pus: It’s What’s for Dinner
What follows could be the most disgusting thing in this whole book. (Consider that a warning.)
St. Catherine of Siena, who lived in the 1300s, once nursed a woman with a dreadful growth on her body. No one else would do the job because pus and horrible odors came out of this growth. But even though Catherine took excellent care of the afflicted woman, she was ashamed that the ailment could so disgust her. So to overcome her disgust and to show her religious devotion, Catherine apparently collected the pus coming out of the growth and drank it.
Hey, how do you think she became a saint? If there is something to like about this horrifying story, it’s that even the most disgusting situation can bring out the best in people.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go lie down.
* * *
[13] Okay, okay, it’s an inflamed eyelid.
It’s a Gross World, After All !
“It’s hard to define gross because it will often vary from one culture to the next. But what is constant is that each culture will find something disgusting. It’s one of the primary features of any civilization.”
—
—William I. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust
All across the planet, people show their disgust by making a “scrunched-up” face. But why do we all do that? Some scientists think the reason we squint our eyes and scrunch up our noses is because this helps screen out nasty-looking and nasty-smelling stuff. So when you make the disgusted face, you see less and you smell less. That’s handy!
But there are many differences between how grossness is defined from one place to the next. For example, an international survey about what various countries find to be gross revealed this:
LocationThing That Grosses Them Out
India Kissing in public; other people’s clothes
Great Britain Dead sparrows; cruelty to horses; eating bugs
The Netherlands Dog saliva; politicians
Athens International Airport Wet people; being eaten alive by insects
This raises an interesting question: What’s wrong with wet people, and why don’t Greeks like them? Oh well, I suppose some things will never be known!
There are good reasons to be disgusted by some things (pus, anyone?), but people also freak out in illogical ways. For example, I am sort of sickened by confetti and other really small pieces of paper. And if they get wet (like spitballs), it absolutely grosses me out.
But if I were to get enough people to agree with me about this, it wouldn’t seem slightly odd to be a freak about wet confetti. It would be normal!
The main thing that changes from country to country is what gets defined as “cooties.” This is the idea that if something gross touches something normal, the normal thing somehow becomes infected. Another word for this is contamination.
Based on my research, India is one of the most contamination-fearing cultures in the world. The idea of wearing the laundered clothes of another person is disgusting to millions of Indians, because the “essence” of the person is still in the threads. And Americans and Europeans are generally not interested in eating insects, though enjoying a handful of termites is no big deal to many folks living in South America, Australia, and Africa.
One thing that humans everywhere agree on is that if something is really gross, you just want to get away from it. This helps explain why people who want to express strong anger or disgust sometimes will throw a disgusting thing AT someone else. For example, some politicians get eggs thrown at them by their opponents. (Sadly, in my family, it can also be a way of saying, “We love you.”)
Lights, Camera, Fart!
The Swedish word for “action” is “fart.”
It was not always widely known that showing someone the sole of your shoe is a deep insult in the Middle East. Shoes are viewed as being somewhat disgusting there, since a person might have stepped in anything! But after an Iraqi journalist threw his shoe at the U.S. president in 2008, this way of looking at shoes became more well-known. Soon, copycat shoe-throwers in China and Israel tried their hand at this expression of disgust.
This led me to wonder about other kinds of stuff people throw to show their displeasure. Here’s one from Canada! In 2007, a school principal was suspended for throwing poop at a twelve-year-old kid who was bothering her.
Human poop.
Okay, I’m done.
French Poop
There’s a place in Paris called Le Musée de la Poupée. Wow! A whole museum devoted to poop?! I had to see that.
So you can imagine my disappointment when I traveled there and found that it’s actually a museum of dolls. But
since I was in France anyway, I decided to learn a little more about the French and their poop.
Probably the weirdest thing I found out was that in the 1700s, French noblewomen used a special snuff called poudrette. Snuff is usually made of powdered tobacco that is inhaled quickly up the nose. But the main ingredient of poudrette was dried, powdered human poop.
It was inhaled quickly up the nose.
Yikes! The French seem to have a healthy relationship with poop. For example, more than three hundred years ago, King Louis XIV liked to receive diplomatic visitors while he was pooping. (Maybe he inspired U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson, who did the same thing with reporters and his staff.) But even so, the worst insult the former emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, could think of was, “He is a silk stocking filled with dung.”