Comments on: At Barts Pathology Museum

By: JL

JL — Mon, 11 May 2015 04:53:12 +0000

I’d love to visit this museum someday. As a child of a physician, I grew up skimming through medical and surgical textbooks on my Dad’s bookshelves and I always wondered why medical specimens struck people as being so macabre…I just cannot relate to that view, but I have a pretty good idea why lol

By: John Campbell

John Campbell — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 18:45:03 +0000

Phew! Glad you weren’t offended. Pressed ‘submit comment’and then thought that maybe i should not be telling people online how lovely they look. Hey, no harm done, thats good. Really enjoyed reading the article about your work there, fascinating stuff. hope to make one of the events sometime. Good luck with all your projects, John.

By: Carla Valentine

Carla Valentine — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 10:00:54 +0000

Thank you John Campbell for the lovely comment AND for the chimney sweep info. I’m currently writing a book about the collection and hope to really bring all these stories to life (pardon the pun!)
The Eat Your Heart Out event that I put on with miss cakehead was a great success and I still have plenty of other interesting ideas on how to engage people with a collection such as this – watch this space!

By: John Campbell

John Campbell — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 16:57:20 +0000

…and there’s more!!
The life of your average English chimney sweep was pretty crappy. Practically from the time they could walk, sweeps spent hours each day scrambling up into claustrophobic brick chimneys—some just 9 inches deep by 14 inches wide—in order to clean out grime and even put out the odd fire. At best, they emerged filthy with coal soot, their knees scraped raw from the climb. At worst, the sweeps got stuck, especially in crooked chimneys and chimneys narrowed by years of atherosclerotic soot buildup. If they got really stuck, a bricklayer would have to be found to cut them out, but not infrequently the poor lads suffocated in the meantime.

On top of all that, in later life, even if they’d squirmed up their last chimney decades earlier, the sweeps became susceptible to scrotal cancer. It started as scrotum warts. Many sweeps dispatched these warts by squeezing them between a split piece of wood and popping them off with knives or razors. Eventually, though, a sort of mesa of raised red skin appeared and turned into a smelly sore, which might spread to the thighs or anus. Doctors would either prescribe arsenic paste to slough the sores off, or operate and remove swaths of scrotum. Often, though, the sweep waited too long to seek care, and he would die.
Not such a jolly ‘oliday with Mary was it?

By: John Campbell

John Campbell — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 16:53:05 +0000

Found this Cherub which may be of help,
…doctors traced the source of the cancer to sending boys up still-hot chimneys (a common practice), which made them sweat and allowed soot to adhere to their wet skin. The scrotum’s many wrinkles provided an especially fine home for grime, especially when (another common practice) boys climbed naked and their thighs rubbed against their junk in the tight spaces, grinding the soot in. Chimney sweeps also had a well-earned reputation (even by 1700s standards) as being pretty indifferent to bathing, which meant the scrotum soot never got washed away. After years of such abuse, in Pott’s memorable summary, the cancer awakens and “seizes the testicle, which it enlarges, hardens, and renders truly and thoroughly distempered.”
PS. That Carla Valentine is a lovely looking lady!

By: Cherub

Cherub — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 14:31:24 +0000

I had never heard about chimney sweeps getting testicular cancer and can only assume this had something to do with what was in soot? As for the jars of stones, my husband passed a kidney stone about 3 months ago after suffering niggling pain for weeks then almost fainting in agony one night – I’ll be showing him these to let him see what he was actually carrying around with him. It might just remind him some aches and pains do need a doctor to check them out!

By: geraldine snape (mcclelland)

geraldine snape (mcclelland) — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:27:04 +0000

love this one as my daughter from neviepiecakes..made the “rotten toes” from cake that were used in the event put on by misscakehead earlier in the year…fantastic!!

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 07:59:24 +0000

Although not usually open to the public I jumped at the chance to visit and eat cupcakes with STD pustules, varicose veins and the like iced on the top last Hallowe’en.
A fascinating collection and a surreal experience.

Thank you for the reminder.

By: Ana

Ana — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 07:03:29 +0000

Love it.
If I was there, I’d be visiting.
It takes me back to my days studying anatomy at university as part of a science degree. Museums like these make us all appreciate how hardy [or fragile, depending on how one perceives it] the human body is.

By: A granny

A granny — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 06:27:30 +0000

One wonders how the gentle author finds these places?!! Fascinating information although perhaps not meant to be read before bedtime……