Feature article
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Medical time machine
By Teresa Hicks
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| A CircOlectric Bed from ther Styrker Corp, Kalamazoo, Mich., is among the displays. |
Mountain Home Museum keeps alive the days of the iron lung, bronchoscopes and other early health tools. Visit it and you’ll likely come away with an even greater appreciation of today’s medical technology.
Medicine is a field of study that is constantly changing. With every discovery or clinical trial, medicine moves forward. New therapies are discovered, old ones become outdated, and lives are saved.
Through their collaborative efforts, the East Tennessee State University College of Medicine and the James H. Quillen VA Medical Center have been a part of many medical advances over the years. Today, the two institutions maintain another collaboration that is dedicated to preserving medicine’s past.
The Museum at Mountain Home, housed in Building 34 at the VA, is home to a collection of medical and military artifacts dating back to the early 20th century. The museum’s board of directors includes members from the College of Medicine, the VA and the community. In order to know where the profession of medicine is going, they believe, one must remember where it has been.
“Isaac Newton said that anything he accomplished was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Well, that’s true in medicine too,” said Dr. Calvin Morgan, vice president of the museum’s board of directors.
A large portion of the museum’s artifacts came from two principal collectors: Dr. Carroll Long and Dr. Walter Hankins. Both practiced medicine in Northeast Tennessee, and both had an interest in preserving portions of the heritage of their craft. Other doctors and their families knew of the pair’s interest, so people would frequently offer them items, knowing that they would keep and care for them.
In the late 1970s, the ETSU College of Medicine library began its own collection of medical memorabilia. “Then in 1994, Dr. Carl Gerber, who was the VA director at the time, realized that there were also VA people who were collecting artifacts, so he got the two groups together and he found this space for us,” said Martha Whaley, ETSU’s medical history librarian.
The space Gerber found was the VA’s old mess hall, a cavernous room that now houses a series of exhibits comprising many artifacts, including primitive surgical tools, diagnostic equipment, medicine bottles, medical books and photos and uniforms from a century’s worth of wars. The museum board recently began conducting tours for first-year ETSU medical students as part of the university curriculum. “We talk to them about history and talk to them about professionalism,” said Dr. T.T. “Sam” Knight, the board’s president.
“We want them to come away with an impression of the culture of medicine.” Most academic disciplines fall under the category of either humanities or science, but medicine is both, Knight said. He believes learning about the history of medicine gives students a better understanding of the human aspect of the profession.
“Technology dehumanizes some things in the profession,” he said. “Not intentionally, but it just happens that way.” The museum’s artifacts represent not just a more primitive era in technology, but a different way of thinking about medicine.
“The true science in medicine is a 20th century development,” Knight said. “Anything prior to that time was about what you believed rather than what you could prove.”
Evidence-based medicine with its research and clinical trials and scientific standards is actually a somewhat recent development.
“All of that really happened after about 1960 or 1965,” Knight said. “Dr. Morgan and I were alive and in medicine during that time. We have a perspective on where we’ve been and how we got here, and we try to pass that on.”
In one corner of the museum is a re-creation of the complete office of Dr. A.J. Willis, a general practitioner who served the Taylor’s Bridge community in the 1940s and 1950s.
“He was famous for going around on horseback and delivering babies. Everybody on the lower end of the county knew Dr. Willis. Not only did he deliver babies and take out appendixes, but from the looks of that table there, he pulled teeth. Those are dental forceps,” Morgan said, pointing to a tray of shiny tools.
The “office” features a collection of medicinal remedies and examination tools, along with Willis’ leather case and saddlebags.
On a separate table next to a wash basin and cake of Octagon soap sits a wooden box labeled, “lollipops for good little boys and girls.” Over on the roll-top desk is Willis’ radio, which had its own special purpose.
“He did not have a wall between the waiting room and his clinic, so he used to have that radio on to muffle the noise,” said Suresh Ponnappa, associate dean of ETSU’s medical library.
A display case just beyond Willis’ office features a set of bronchoscopes and esophagoscopes, along with a collection of foreign objects removed from patients’ lungs and stomachs. The objects include keys, coins, buttons, safety pins and even an “I like Ike” badge. Morgan remembers using the same old-fashioned scopes in his practice as a non-cardiac thoracic surgeon.
“See that safety pin? A kid would swallow a safety pin, and it wouldn’t be closed. It would get in their bronchus, and it would be open, pointing up, so you couldn’t pull it out because the point would just dig in,” he said. “Dr. Chevalier Jackson invented an instrument you could put down there and squeeze the thing and close it and then you could pull it out. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy to get that safety pin closed.”
Perhaps the most popular exhibit in the museum is an iron lung that was used at the old Memorial Hospital in Johnson City in the 1940s.
“Back when the polio epidemic was big, Wytheville, Va., was almost destroyed by polio. It seemed like every other person up there had it,” said Morgan.
Polio is a virus that can attack a patient’s nervous system, sometimes paralyzing the muscles used for breathing. The iron lung was used to keep such patients alive long enough to recover from the virus.
A patient would lie inside the machine with his or her head exposed to the room air. The iron lung manually expanded and contracted the chest by changing the pressure inside the air-tight chamber with an electric motor.
“Then air would be pushed in, and that would squeeze the chest, and then the air would be sucked out and the chest would be expanded,” said Morgan. “It was like an early respirator.”
“It was inefficient compared to modern ventilators,” added Knight. “Modern ventilators are used with a tube in the airway. The pressure and release of pressure is applied to that tube, which expands the chest.”
The iron lung was intended to be a temporary therapy until the patient recovered from the polio infection and regained enough strength to breathe without assistance.
“But sometimes they didn’t die, but they didn’t get strong enough to breathe either, so they just had to stay in there,” Knight said.
The Museum at Mountain Home is open to the public Tuesdays from 9-11 a.m., Wednesdays from 1:30-3:30 p.m. and Thursdays from 9-11 a.m. For more information or to arrange a group tour, call Whaley at 439-8069.
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