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Takoma Park, Maryland, circa 1928. "Washington Sanitarium classroom." National Photo Company Collection glass negative. View full size.
If your head or dean or principal or prefect has a private shower, it's great fun to hang one of these in his shower and listen for the reaction.
In art school we used to have a skeleton who was kept in the (pardon the pun) drawing room as an anatomy aid. Dressed in different clothes almost every day (he usually looked quite dapper), he was wheeled around to various locations. One never knew where he would pop up.
Eventually some politically correct staff member locked the poor guy up in a storeroom. Something about "the dignity of the dead."
If only that staffer could have seen the exhibits making the rounds of high class galleries these days where corpses are splayed, posed and shown as fine art.
My wife, who is a college professor in a Nursing program, loved this shot. She says the one major difference from then to now is the profusion of electronics. The modern medical training room is crowded with computers and machines. Medicine today is definitely high-tech.
The comparison of this photo to today makes me wonder what a medical training classroom will look like 80 years from now. I'm sure it will still have a hanging skeleton, though. That seems to have become the norm over the centuries.
There has got to be a joke here about Jenny Craig but it just won't come to me. Sorry to let my fellow Shorpsters down.
Back in the '60s I had a job at a large medical supply firm in NYC that had a workshop for constructing display skeletons from Indian imports. My job was to use a band saw to remove the top of the skull and add hinges and a clasp so the cranial cavity could be examined on the completed skeleton. I will never forget the smell as the blade, without coolant, heated and cut through the bone.
I doubt that the photographer was hoping to provide laughs with this shot, but I find it pretty funny. The dummy and the skeleton keeping each other company, that's good. Being a southpaw, I hated those desks when I was in school.
"Viewed full size" to check out the skeleton, and almost choked on my coffee over the creepy looking patient in the bed.
I'm not doin' mouth to mouth on THAT thing!
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