I waited a long time to go to the Siriraj Medical Museum but finally got in today with my perfect companion –Josh.When I have tried to find this museum in the past I usually take a boat, wander aimlessly around this huge hospital complex and leave frustrated because the museum(s) are closed, under renovation or I simply could not find them. This time, for some reason I took a taxi and he took us almost directly to the museum.
In fact, there are 4 museums in one. There is a quite innocuous museum of the contributions of the king to medical science. After reading about how gracious and wonderful the king was, we then slipped into the museum of Forensic Medicine. I will not forget what I saw for the rest of my life. The skulls with the bullet holes didn’t really faze me, nor did the pictures of the suicide victims with their hands cut off at the wrist or blood oozing from their necks. What got to me and Josh were the bottles filled with both embryos and babies. Now I know where the term Siamese twins comes from. One particularly disturbing jar had Siamese twins conjoined at the face. Each shared one nostril, eye, half a lip and so on. It actually looked like a sculpture of a couple in love from a distance but provided quite a jolt when you looked closely. There were about 5 bottles filled with Siamese twins. The other fetuses were in obvious stages of distress and were so alarming I could not take the camera out of its holster. I doubt whether you would want to see what we saw anyway. You probably enjoy sleeping too much.
It left me wondering what happened to the mothers, who gave permission to show these fetuses, did the mother live and so on. Are there ethical criteria to decide what goes on display? For example, we also saw preserved dead bodies “standing up” in what appeared to be a phone booth of sorts. They were almost naturally mummified. I can’t imagine these in a Canadian museum but maybe???
In the anatomy museum, Josh was fascinated at the display of just nerves dangling in their proper place in the body but there was no body. In another room, there were skeletons but what made this different from other museums was that there were pictures above the display case of the people when they were alive.
It was clearly fascinating, in a crude way, but very disturbing. Hopefully tomorrow will be better when we go to the beach for a few days. Joshua is out to-night with my Thai teacher and her friends. I just hope he gets home relatively early so we can get a jump on the day.
In fact, there are 4 museums in one. There is a quite innocuous museum of the contributions of the king to medical science. After reading about how gracious and wonderful the king was, we then slipped into the museum of Forensic Medicine. I will not forget what I saw for the rest of my life. The skulls with the bullet holes didn’t really faze me, nor did the pictures of the suicide victims with their hands cut off at the wrist or blood oozing from their necks. What got to me and Josh were the bottles filled with both embryos and babies. Now I know where the term Siamese twins comes from. One particularly disturbing jar had Siamese twins conjoined at the face. Each shared one nostril, eye, half a lip and so on. It actually looked like a sculpture of a couple in love from a distance but provided quite a jolt when you looked closely. There were about 5 bottles filled with Siamese twins. The other fetuses were in obvious stages of distress and were so alarming I could not take the camera out of its holster. I doubt whether you would want to see what we saw anyway. You probably enjoy sleeping too much.
It left me wondering what happened to the mothers, who gave permission to show these fetuses, did the mother live and so on. Are there ethical criteria to decide what goes on display? For example, we also saw preserved dead bodies “standing up” in what appeared to be a phone booth of sorts. They were almost naturally mummified. I can’t imagine these in a Canadian museum but maybe???
In the anatomy museum, Josh was fascinated at the display of just nerves dangling in their proper place in the body but there was no body. In another room, there were skeletons but what made this different from other museums was that there were pictures above the display case of the people when they were alive.
It was clearly fascinating, in a crude way, but very disturbing. Hopefully tomorrow will be better when we go to the beach for a few days. Joshua is out to-night with my Thai teacher and her friends. I just hope he gets home relatively early so we can get a jump on the day.
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