Day 80 - Virchow

Wow today was chock full of stuff. First of all, I thought that I would play an April Fool’s Day joke on you guys by pretending to be done with this blog forever, but luckily for all my readers, I didn’t have that much time between waking up and leaving where I could do this. It took a while to get one of my roommates up, but we eventually made it downstairs for breakfast in time to meet everyone before we left for the day. After breakfast, we left to go to a clinic/medical school to learn about Rudolf Virchow from our professor. After the lecture about his life, we walked around for a little bit and saw the museum of the History of Medicine. It was actually a pretty cool place, and – like a lot of the other museums we’ve been to - held both wax and real organs. Our guide for the museum was a really cool person who called himself tiny Tom to distinguish himself from the other two much taller Tom's who were tour guides at the same museum. He was really entertaining as he took us through normal physiology to gall and bladder stones and even through the history of anesthesia. At one point, he even pointed out the different stones and said that they would be fashionable in the upcoming year to wear as earrings or pendants because they were "personal gifts and the right color." He brought us to a piece of the original building that was mercilessly bombed, but recreated and transformed into a lecture space and later a restaurant space. 

 The first person killed by the Communist soldiers after the wall was built

 The clinic/ Med school

Virchow's bust on his campus

After the break, Tom took us upstairs to where the hospital section was located. We saw things like the iron lung and various bed and chairs that would have been used way back when the museum was actually an insane asylum before WWII. Then he took us to the most interesting part of the museum: the organs. This room contained specimens starting from the late 1800's when autopsies and dissections first came on the scene as entertainment for the rich and powerful. It showed healthy tissue, then a lot of diseases with the organ or system, then an in-depth progression of one disease that greatly affected a large majority of the population. We spent probably close to an hour just looking at all the different diseases of organs and systems before we had to break for lunch. Which may not have been the best idea if we hadn't been desensitized to pickled organs long before this. 

Lunch was in the main station with almost everyone in the bio-sciences program before heading back to the medical school/clinic for skills testing. We had a lecture by some of the student tutors about the medical school system in Germany before going to some of the different rooms where the students were taught and practiced their practical exams. We also saw an ambulance and learned how they would want to use it in the future to practice what you would do if the ambulance broke down or some other needful skill. Then we came to my favorite part. We walked into a room that mainly focused on Geriatrics as well as a minor interest in lungs and the heart. There were weights that we could put on to help us feel what an elderly person feels (impaired joints, weights on the body arms and legs, sound mufflers, and glasses to impair vision) as well as these cool gloves that simulate how the nerves and motor functions in the hands deteriorate as you get older. These gloves gave off electrical impulses that made your handwriting almost illegible. The lungs and heart only had some dummies with artificial breaths and heartbeats so we could hear what they would sound like through a stethoscope. We had a ton of fun trying everything out, but soon we had to leave.

 I can't see! I feel old...

 Just having fun with the suits

And the gloves were a popular choice too

We headed to the Brandenburg bridge to take a group picture before heading to the restaurant that we were eating at. It was a fantastic dinner with Moroccan style food and we had a ton of fun talking with everyone around the table. After dinner, we sang happy birthday to the two people who had foolish birthdays before heading back to the hotel. A lot of us were planning on going to a drag show with the birthday people, but about half of our group needed to stay behind so we could make sure our presentation was presentable for Otto Bock. By the time we were finished, it was about an hour and a half after when the show would have started, as well as being pretty late, so I just went back up to the room to get ready for bed. Tomorrow is another museum with a lot of free time in the afternoon. The only thing is that we also have to practice our presentation tomorrow, but it's a necessary evil so we don't look crazy in front of a fantastic prosthetic company.

The Brandenburg gate behind me

Till tomorrow!

Erin Z