The Gory Details (Gross)

Gory Details #25: "Machine Me"

It might seem odd that the Gore Monger would be interested in medical devices. Why bother putting it all back together again when it's so much more fun to smash it all apart? For me it started with skull drills. Way back when I was a wee lad, the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians and lots of other people had figured out that some illnesses caused pressure in the skull that could be relieved by drilling a few holes in the skull and letting some of the juice out. Some primitive cultures will drill you a brain hole just for the relief of headaches.

It's easy to say your going to drill a brain hole. Try it: "I'm going to drill a hole in his head." Doing so, with primitive equipment is quite a feat. Usually, it starts with alcohol, for the victim, for the surgeon in some cases, but almost never for the scalp. Germ prevention is a pretty new idea. The regular, dirty old scalp gets sliced open and pulled aside in the plain old wet tearing kind of way. Next, a medicine person puts their feet up on either side of the victim's head and a hole is drilled through the skull by twisting a blade as if a fire were being started. Victory is declared when clear goo starts running from the hole. It hurts like hell and takes a long time. Just the way I like it.

In all my years of keeping notes, I've seen some doozy medical devices: Bone saws, speculums, there are some great gizmos out there. Here are some of my favorites.

My favorite mideveal torture...er...medical device is called the Spatula Mundani. This dates from the 1600s and looks very much one of those salad spoon and tong on a hinge things you see at buffets. One came to the Jamestown colony in the late 1500s. It is described as being used to treat "severe constipation." I don't want to say anything indelicate but that's a damn big spoon. I can't sit still and type about it at the same time. Ouch!

Also popular in the middle ages and enjoying a strange renaissance is candling. This is the practice of putting one end of a candle in your ear and then lighting the other end. Sorry kids, the disease does not travel down the candle and out the flame. You do however run the real risk of setting your head on fire and also of looking like a total dumbass as you drip hot wax on your own face. Hmmm, the smell of burning hair; makes you forget a pesky cold.

Some more modern devices are just as hideous. Take the iron lungs used from the 1910s forward. The theory here was that, if you couldn't draw your lungs open enough on your own, you could be put in a big vacuum cleaner that would do the work for you. While they have been almost completely replaced by positive pressure devices, some people spent their entire lives trapped in these iron lungs.

"So," you say, "at least they were alive." Yes. They were alive but the cost could be tremendous. First of all, a Lung didn't care why you couldn't breathe on you own. It used negative pressure to pull your lungs open whether they wanted to go or not. Many fire victims and other survivors of lung compromising illnesses, were placed on iron lungs and then suffered terribly as their already damaged lungs were ripped apart inside them.

Many iron lung patients eventually died of lung illness. This could be the disease that brought them to the hospital, stress caused by the machine or the rasping of lungs filled and emptied against their will, till they filled up with fluid on their own.

Modern machines can be down right devious as well. For one thing there's one for everything. There's a little guy who's whole job in life is to rout out your lacrimal duct so you can cry. There's one that holds your ears level so they can X-ray your head. (Not unlike the Spatula Mundani really, only it's for you head.)

Here though is my very favorite modern medical device.

It's called a segregator and looks, at first, simple enough. All you've got is a pair of plastic bags with hoses that run into a single hose. This hose turns into a ball after a foot or so and two thin hoses run out of that. There. How bad could that be? I'll explain. The segregator separates the urine of the left kidney into one bag and the right into another. The ball with the two tubes gets stuck up your pee hole while some cold handed doctor with long forceps steers a tube up into the two drainholes in your bladder. Can I just say, "Let me die!"

There are many more medical devices, many of them lovely and terrible to behold. The lowly curet (surgical spoon) has tremendous potential just by itself. The power of a medical device, to me, however, comes from the intentional nature of the harm. An accidental poisoning is sad and tragic. Setting a character up on a slow drip and intentionally left to agonize all night...well, that's kinda special.

Now, get out there and write.

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