Dead Men Do Tell Tales
I honestly wish I’d been in Cleveland last weekend. That way, I could have wormed my way into a fab-sounding Halloween party in a building containing more than 3,000 real human skeletons!
I’m talking, of course, about the world-famous “Bones, Bugs and Dead Animals” bash at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, home of the world’s largest well-documented skeleton collection.
Just picture it: physical anthropologists and rare beetle experts rocking out to the lilting melodies of local band “Satan’s Satellites” and drinking deeply of Balto Beer. (The beer is named--as your kid could no doubt tell you--after Balto, the heroic sled dog who brought medicine to sick children in Nome, Alaska, in 1925. Balto was stuffed after he died and now haunts the museum halls along with all the skeletons.)
Even when the museum isn’t awash with food and drink, the 3,100 skeletons exert an eerie, powerful draw on scientists all over the world. Like zombies, the scientists come--marching purposefully to the snug little drawers where each skeleton rests alone, lovingly measuring the lengths or breadths of bones, noting fractures, tallying signs of antiquated surgeries, penning their findings in journals to mesmerize colleagues far and wide.
In fact, it’s estimated that a scientific article on the bones gets published every two weeks . Yet museum officials swear that no spells and incantations in dank crypts in dead of night are employed to draw the scientists. No need. Apparently, there are endless things you can learn from a heap of old bones like this.
Part of the power of the Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection, as it’s properly called, is how well-documented it is, says museum director Bruce Latimer. And how diverse. There are bones from women and men; bones from 1-year-olds through 100-year olds; bones of different racial groups--and a slew of information such as weight and cause of death to accompany each skeleton. All the deceased were once residents of Cleveland and died primarily in the first half of the 20th century; their bodies had been left, unclaimed, at the Cleveland morgue or local hospitals. Carl August Hamann, anatomy professor at nearby Western Reserve University Medical school, started the collecting in 1893; he dreamed of building a skeleton research resource. Later, another anatomy professor--T. Wingate Todd--took over the effort and built it up to its current size.
At one point the collection was distributed in boxes all over the campus of Case Western Reserve University, which must have provided a shock or two for university janitors. It nearly got chucked out entirely but was rescued bit by bit, starting in the 1950s.
And it’s a very good thing, says Latimer, given all that can be learned from the bones.
There are tuberculosis cases aplenty in the collection--but also murders and suicides. Two particular skeletons met their end in a bar fight: One man shot a second man, who fought back with a knife before he died. They lie next to each other now, for all eternity.
The skeletons are from the pre-antibiotic era, so scientists who have a yen to do so can use the collection to learn about the effects on bone of bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis or syphilis. Some of the changes were inflicted not by microbes but by doctors who used to cut a hole in the rib cage of patients in the final stages of TB in order to deflate the lung. “It didn’t help,” Latimer says.
Traces of other, antique surgeries include holes cut in the skull to relieve pressure or allow access to the brain, and removal of the mastoid bone (the bump behind the ear) in people who’d had serious ear infections. The idea was to keep a local infection from spreading to the brain.
Archeologists, too, can find the collection handy. If they find a skeleton and don’t know the cause of death, they can come consult the collection--and often they’ll find a match with a skeleton with a cause of death that’s known.
Scientists can also learn about shapes of pelvises in males versus females and in different racial groups. They can learn, too, about the effects of osteoporosis and arthritis on fracture patterns in bones.
One of Latimer’s favorite fractures crops up in a most unusual place in a pile of early 20th century skeletons--right in the middle of the upper arm, instead of near the shoulder or elbow, as is far more usual.
“I could not for the life of me come up with why this was occurring,” Latimer says.
Then he ran into an old surgeon colleague, who easily identified the injury: fractures caused by cranking old-fashioned motor cars to get them to start.
“You’d turn the crank, and if it slipped out of your hand, it jerked back and could literally break your arm,” Latimer says. “It is an ailment that is now extinct.”
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If you have an idea for a Booster Shots topic, write or e-mail Rosie Mestel at the Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st. St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, rosie.mestel@latimes.com.
