Our blog this week is from Subhadra Das, Curator of Science Collections at UCL Culture.

Today’s specimen of the week comes from UCL Pathology Collections. The Collections are displayed at the UCL Pathology Museum at the Royal Free Campus of the UCL Medical School in Hampstead. The museum includes a medical teaching collection of nearly 3,000 specimens of human remains illustrating the history of disease. To open up these specialist medical displays to a wider audience, we’ve developed a trail of 10 specimens of well known diseases. As the museum only opens to the public for special events, we’re sharing the trail as part of the Specimen of the Week series.

This week’s specimen is a trichobezoar — a mass of undigested hair from the stomach and large intestine of a young girl. As with most of the specimens in UCL Pathology Collections, we know little about the person the specimen comes from beyond their sex and their age, but this rare condition provides an interesting window into the practice of medicine, and its cultural significance extends into the realms of magic. (more…)

After nearly a year working at the Grant Museum I realise I have become accustomed to aesthetics of my working environment. Decorations in your typical office might include team photos, prints of inspirational quotes and once a year, some tinsel. Here our walls are decorated with skulls, intestines and pickled reproductive organs. An interaction between a visitor and myself might involve them asking me ‘what is THAT??’, only for me to matter-of-factly reply ‘oh, that’s a bisected seal nose’. Not all interactions are so cordial however; when one visitor recently told me that our displays were ‘gratuitous’ I gently reminded them that our museum is primarily a teaching collection, meaning students across a wide range of disciplines often look at certain ‘unappealing’ parts of an animal in great detail. I hope that by writing about today’s specimen I can demonstrate why we have these ‘gratuitous’ objects on display, and what they can teach us about animals. Okay readers let’s hop to it, it’s the…

Kangaroo stomach, Macropus sp. LDUCZ-Z43

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