Giving Tours to Doctors

Hey everyone! I hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving and/or relaxing week! I went and visited family up in the northeast.  Lots of fun seeing them, eating good food and playing in snow.  What I want to blog about today is something I don’t think I have covered too much in prior posts and that is giving tours.  I have always wanted to give tours because I love interacting with people so I was thrilled to pass my docent test a few weeks back.  Tours are fun because I like giving information to people, telling stories and learning from them.  They can ask questions that further challenge me to learn things I may not know a lot about yet.  I’ve given a handful of tours in the past few days and they were all fantastic.  On Monday I gave a tour to an orthopedic surgeon who teaches in a school a few hours away.   
 The tour on Monday was fun because he visited because he was considering bringing medical students into the museum.  A lot of our visitors are people that work or did work in the medical field so I was excited.  In every room, he had lots of questions to ask me.  Some I had heard a lot such as “did they really spend so much time in camp?” Yes, yes they did spend an obscene amount of time in camp.  I mean Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was together all four years of the war but they were only in combat about 45 days.  That leaves a LOT of free time.  He of course had more unusual ones relating to bones and surgeries but as a surgeon specializing in it how could he not?

                A number of our galleries have bones in them and I think he really enjoyed those areas the most.  We have a model skeleton foot in our Heroic Medicine room and he pointed out that it is upside down possibly! Uh oh! He is the second orthopedic surgeon to point this out this week though so I think they may be on to something.  Our curator says though that as a teaching tool it was bolted to the wood and was probably done on purpose so students could see the underside of the foot.   Also in the amputation room he enjoyed hearing about how surgeries were performed and why.  Remember, biting the bullet is a myth! They had anesthesia back then and they used it! Bullets are choking hazards! I liked talking about how the soft lead bullets shatter bone though because I feel like he was genuinely interested in understanding how surgeons were not butchers back then.  By explaining how the ammunition deforms and then shatters bone all while dragging dirt, debris and gun powder through the wound , I was able to explain how amputations were done not because of laziness or surgeons wanting to be sawbones but because they were medically necessary to prevent gangrene, sepsis and infection! A shattered bone is almost impossible to fix today and in the 1860s.  Believe me and thousands of doctors, amputations saved lives back then.   

                He also enjoyed looking at the mummified arm because it showed bone within flesh that had suffered a traumatic injury.  He was also able to confirm what the Smithsonian had told us and that is that the arm belonged to a teenager still growing because the growth plates were visible in the x-ray.  Later on I showed him the six bones we have that showed soldiers that stayed in Frederick during the war.  These bones I think are very effective at showing the damage the bullets did because they are completely rent by the ammunition.  Finally, it was all connected back into modern medicine because the foundation for today’s medicine was laid 150 years ago by Dr. Jonathon Letterman and other innovators.  The scalpels, tourniquets, prosthetics and more is all very similar to what was used by the Union and Confederacy. 

                I am always happy to give tours and especially happy to do when I know that someone has enjoyed them so much.  I hope to seethe surgeon and his students back because I feel like there is so much to learn from the past still.  

One of the bone exhibits we have on display.  Artifact on loan from the National Institute of Health and Medicine.