I had planned a peaceful Wednesday during independent reading week, where I just caught up on all my work and ate ice cream. But my academic mom decided that we should go to Edinburgh, and since I love trains, I couldn’t turn that down.
We ended up just barely catching the train, but really, that’s just par for the course at this point. Once we got into Edinburgh, we did a lot of the typical stuff – food, getting kicked out of restaurants for a lack of ID, more food, and strange photos. We ended up at the Museum of Medicine which is simultaneously awesome and creepy. There’s a holographic dissection of a cadaver in an old-fashioned lecture hall, displays of traditional surgical tools, and a terrifying amount of body parts in jars. Kidneys, brains, feet – pretty much everything was in jars. On the first floor, there were several creepy skeletons and models that didn’t concern me too much. But on the higher levels, things changed a little bit.
The balcony level is almost solely things preserved in jars. Most of the items preserved aren’t anatomically-normal parts, but rather limbs or organs that are medically interesting. While gruesome, it’s not all that scary to wander around. A bit surreal, given the lighting (fluorescent and but weirdly shadowy) and the layout (think disgraced, eccentric millionaire-scientist who’s moved his collection into his mansion). Below that balcony was a series of alcoves, with different exhibits.
I was looking at one exhibit when my friend walked up next to me. I turned to say something to her, and surprise, surprise, there was a face floating in a jar. I’m fairly certain that if there were eyes in the face, they would have been staring at me. Possibly glaring. Who knows; it was a disembodied face, I doubt there’s a lot of psychological research into how those think.
I don’t think anyone could blame me for freaking out, just a little.
The whole vibe of the museum decided to remain suitably strange when my friend and I tried to leave. We ended up getting trapped in a strange hallway that looked like a fancy haunted mansion, with red carpets – does anyone really need red carpets? But we did make it out, without anyone trying to dissect us, despite my (very valid) concerns.
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