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A Grave Matter: Legislating Dissection

It’s 1855 in Cleveland, Ohio and you need a surgeon. There were quite a few local options including the physicians out of the Cleveland Medical College and the Western Homeopathic College of Cleveland. In soliciting one of these (mostly) men, you assume that they have the adequate experience to perform whatever operation you need. But where did they get it? Until December 5, 1855, the citizens of Cleveland were kept in the relative dark about how local medical men gained experience with the human body through dissection. At the time, Ohio had no legal way specified as to how medicals...

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Grave Robbing for "The Benefit of the Living"

Rattle his bones over the stones, He’s only a pauper, whom nobody owns.  Imagine you are a sick pauper living in Cleveland, Ohio in 1855. For shelter and medical attention, you stay at the newly built City Infirmary, where faculty and students of the Cleveland Medical College offer their services. Alas, your illness cannot be cured and you die – friendless and alone. Your body is taken to the Potter’s Field in Woodland Cemetery across town. But there it is not to stay. In November 1855, the Cleveland police caught a young demonstrator of anatomy, Dr. Proctor Thayer, with two young medical...

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Deadly Diphtheria: the children's plague

Diphtheria (Corynebacterium diphtheriae), an acute bacterial infection spread by personal contact, was the most feared of all childhood diseases. Diphtheria may be documented back to ancient Egypt and Greece, but severe recurring outbreaks begin only after 1700. One of every ten children infected died from this disease. Symptoms ranged from severe sore throat to suffocation due to a 'false membrane' covering the larynx. The disease primarily affected children under the age of 5. Until treatment became widely available in the 1920s, the public viewed this disease as a death sentence. In the 1880s Dr. Joseph O’Dwyer, a Cleveland native, developed...

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Sometimes Cleveland beckons one home: [re]introducing Brandy Schillace

Bucking a long-term trend, some very talented and creative people are returning to Cleveland to ply their métier. In my own family, our daughter Patty found her way back into a rewarding museum career path after being away for five years.  I was pretty much resigned to her long-term absence from the Cleveland scene, when much to my pleasure, she secured a position in the education department of the Cleveland Museum of Art.  Since November 2010, she has been a part of the team fashioning Gallery One, a truly path-breaking endeavor to help visitors “learn how works of art are...

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