Singin' in the rain...

...not so much!

Our magical mystery medical history tour definitely managed to piss off the weather gods. The first week it was scheduled, we had to cancel due to that record snowfall. Rescheduled to this past Monday, there was no snow--just wind-driven, nearly freezing, constant rain. I rarely complain about the weather, but Monday was ridiculous.

I was wet from the feet to my knees (from walking through puddles) and from the head to my knees from the rain (despite a capacious brolly)...wet met in the middle and went all the way through to the skin.

Students, who were just as wet, were troopers...at least until we lost a clump of them in Guy's Hospital after lunch, and had to wait (in that driving cold rain) for four buses before they caught up with us at the Liverpool St. station. By that time, the wind had been taken out of all of our sails, involved as it was in blowing umbrellas inside out. We did a perfunctory walk towards Brick Lane, ducked into Spitalfields Market (unrecognizeably gentrified to anyone who ever saw the market in its historic state, now a wasteland of twee and precious restaurants for the yuppies who are pushing the more rought and ready market and traditional immigrant groups out of the East End of London).

Morning was interesting, though, including a selective history of the City of London, with details about plagues and pestilences and public health. We did get to see the Hogarth mural and great hall at St. Bart's (hurray!) before heading to London Bridge and the Old Operating Theatre. That was very atmospheric, 32 steps up the tiniest circular stairway I've ever seen into the attic of a church, an area that had served historically as the surgical site for the historic hospital's women's wards next door. At the operating theatre, Orjon played the patient, Krista the dresser, and Naomi [who coincidentally is interning at King's College Hospital ER] played the surgeon. The primitive surgical tools (adapted from butchering items used at the historic Smithfield meat market just over the bridge), the basket of sawdust beneath the wooden operating table (with its saw cuts), and the quality of light in the theatre certainly leant a certain...well....gruesome authenticity...to the re-enactment of a leg amputation sans antiseptics or anaesthetics.

Of course, that tableau was very gender bending, since back in the day the patient in that operating theatre would most definitely have been a woman, and the dresser and surgeon would certainly have been men. Anyway, all of the rather titillating information of medical practices and accoutrement past interested me, and seemed to interest the students, too. It is an interesting little museum and luckily well preserved, though only because it was in the attic of a church [located there due to need for natural lights for surgeries]. We also found out about experiments in blood transfusions using quills as conduits and dogs as blood donors; bodysnatchers working to provide corpses for surgeons-in-training to dissect; that many of London's green squares were plague burial pits; and that survival rates for 19th century surgeries were so low that surgery patients typically had to prepay a despoit on potential funeral expenses, just in case. For the imaginative, the museum displays of forceps historically used to wrench newborns from their mothers, and the "stone cutting" tools used to relieve men of kidney/bladder stones would surely work as cautionary safeguards against pregnancy and Diet Coke!

Student journals indicate that they have been very observant and able to relate course concepts to health-related situations they've observed in London. I wonder if anyone will write about the health risks of being trotted around the city in the pouring rain, trying to learn more about health issues and the historic development of medical knowledge in London?

Next field trip: BBC Television Center on Monday morning, followed by Sicko, with the theme for the day how media shape perceptions and prejudices about social policies. Question for the day: Where/how/from whom did you learn what you knew so far (before studying more systematically in this class) about Social Security and the U.S. health care system, and their relative strengths/weaknesses compared to the UK? We make up the second half of our snow day on Monday too...so it will be another long "all Debi all day." My hunch is that, given recent luck relating weather and field trips, that it will be sunny all day Monday--given that we need to be indoors all day. Time will tell.