Graphs! Edinburgh! Mob rule!
Going round stuff in Edinburgh yesterday was good fun. What's that French word for perambulating round a city, just appreciating the place? Doing that. The uni's anatomy museum was good, but somewhat lacking in explanatory labels for some things - they have things like very deformed spines lying on shelves with no explanations. There's also a sense of dilapidation and abandonment about the place, like medicine's moved on and this is a faint embarrassment they can't get rid of.
For Graeme and Alli - I found out about the strange striped mannequin they have:
"This is a typical example of a dermatome model. A dermatome is the area of the skin supplied by a single, specific spinal nerve root. The bands of skin run horizontally on the trunk and lengthwise on the limbs and are distinguished in dermatome models and charts as different colours. These anatomical ‘maps’ are valuable in locating various sensations in patients with neurological disorders."
Also, they have a twisted and deformed skeleton in a case with a very blunt label of this being 'Bowed Joseph Smith', leader of Edinburgh's Meal Riots. Curiosity being what it is, I looked him up and a very interesting character he was. A cobbler, deformed from birth and highly influential in the city, he was also known as 'General Joe Smith' and would summon huge masses of people to riot by beating on a drum. This wee working class guy (barely over four feet tall) was able to dictate to the great and the good of Edinburgh, lest he rise the citizens up against them.
There's a few wonderful pages on him you can read via Google books in The Waverley Anecdotes, Illustrative of the Incidents, Characters, and Scenery, Described in the Novels and Romances of Sir Walter Scott (sorry, link goes to the wrong page - Bowed Joseph starts on p377).
From a medical point of view his skeleton is included as an example of rickets in a 1921 Manual of Surgery(even labeled as the 'Rickety Dwarf'). The proportions of the arm and leg bones are so out of whack though that I'm not sure there wasn't something congenital going on as well.
The man himself:
In rickets the bone length differentials are supposed to be because of the actions of different sizes of muscles on the softened bone. I don't know why, but something doesn't sit right with all that being purely due to rickets. Ach, well, it didn't seem to cramp his style while he was alive, which is the main thing.