No, this was low tech, just printing a photo from a digital camera. The pictures were deeply disturbing. Not something you’d normally see online, outside of a shock/gore site.
Remember in House of God when the Fat Man organized a colloquium on the topic of no-patient-contact specialities… 
LOL, yeah I remember it well. Psychiatry can be pretty grim too, though.
I just remember “The patient is the one with the disease.” And repeat as necessary. Probably the best law of the House of God.
I got to meet Samuel Shem once, some decades ago. A very nice guy.
I’m slightly amazed that you as an IT person was asked to do this. Couldn’t you have instead shown them how to print them and left it to the medical professionals to print out the disturbing photos?
I used to work as an admin for “medical professionals”. I, too, got to receive/organize/print the disturbing photos. Apparently the consensus is that this sort of thing is admin work and not something the medical professionals spend their time on.
A friend of mine has her fancy-schmancy private practice now, but back when she was a resident in a children’s psych ward she would come back home in tears.
Then there was the guy I met on a trip a couple of decades ago. He was switching from psychiatry to cardiac surgery.
I don’t know how to say this but in Paris there was/maybe still is a museum with a collection of freaky medical specimens (+ photos, engravings, etc.) Some old-timey stuff but someone evidently decided it had scientific value.
ETA it just came to me, I wonder if in all the cases they had to, or bothered to, obtain the next-of-kin’s consent to put the liver, brain, fetus, … in a jar? Is medical waste automatically under the hospital’s jurisdiction?
Those are called “death masks”, typically plaster or wax. They did not have photos way back when. The mask could aid in producing a portrait or statue.
I hate to see those death photos. I don’t like to see people clicking away with cel phones at people in caskets either.
There was a Victorian thing with that, if I remember correctly.
They’d even paint open eyes on their eyelids.
Freaky.
Then Johnny Depp does it.
Gawd!
I distinctly remember photos. There’s been photography since before the Civil war.
Isn’t Victorian about 1880s?
No, you are right, I have seen those death photos. The masks go back much earlier, then when they had the technology photography was used to accomplish the same thing.
There’s a similar sort of museum in Philadelphia.
I just googled to see if I was mistaken. Of course I looked at a few
Yep. Creepy as I thought.
Any town that has a medical school will have a medical museum, some open to the public, and others not.
I once worked with a woman who (spoilered because of potential triggering) had a miscarriage at 4 months, and the doctors wanted to put the baby on display at a medical school because he was so perfectly formed. Most of the people I’ve told this to have said “What kind of sicko would agree to that?” or “If a doctor asked me to put my recently-miscarriaged baby in a jar for people to look at, they’d leave the room with two black eyes” but I have always thought that was a very noble thing they did. Think about how many people have learned from him (and yes, it was a boy).
Many older specimens in medical museums were obtained without consent, and many Native American items have been returned to their tribes over the years. Nowadays, consent needs to be obtained and given.
One of the better-known recent specimens at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia is two skeletons, a man and a woman, who each had a rare disorder called FOP, where muscular tissue turns to bone and we still don’t know why, or how to treat it. Both were done with consent, and the woman agreed to do it if they would display her jewelry with her skeleton. (No problem!)
p.s. The Mutter Museum is on my bucket list.
In the mid to late 1800s, death photos of children were quite popular, because exposure times were too long for the child to reliably sit still, and while the death of a child was a too-common tragedy, at least they could get a good picture to remember them by.
Oh I know why they did it.
They are just creepy. I don’t know how anyone could get comfort from that.
I’m was kinda freakily consumed with my Daddy’s funeral rituals. It caused my family lots of worry about me. Looking back it was my way of coping at the time. I just would hold on to his hand. Pet his face and hair. I took his ring off. That upset my sisters to no end. I couldn’t stop. Til he was in the grave.
So I guess it’s all how you feel. Grief is a funny thing. Gotta do what you gotta do.
Including my cousin, born 3 months preemie at Albany Med in 1979, when such a situation worked out about half the time. He is now a VERY vigorous (as in, climbs Alaskan mountains routinely) father of two, and a gift to all who know him.
(That is to say, thank you, for whatever you do there.)
Egad, this thread is queasy-making.
From the most recent articles, it seems like the real “crime” is the negligence in not addressing the fetal distress / dystocia sooner, possibly in time to save the baby.
Given what was said about the head being delivered vaginally while the body was brought out by c-section, it’s a litte hard to imagine the mother NOT noticing at the time, but she was likely pretty distraught and not thinking clearly, so it’s plausible.
In terms of hiding it from the family… I can sort of see the hospital wanting to try to spare them the horror right at the time. A possibly well-intentioned attempt that has really, really backfired.
Or it could have just been them trying to cover up their mistakes, of course, and hoping nobody noticed. Really stupid fo them to not give the funeral home notice of what happened, of course. The home might have even tried to make the baby look more natural including reattaching the head. I was with friends when they went to the funeral home to arrange their infant’s service; he’d had an autopsy. The home made a point of putting a hat on him, and I think a onesie - we brought those, and waited outside until it was done, then the parents were able to dress him for the last time.
The doctor’s career is certainly over at this point. Even if s/he did everything right, I don’t think that experience is one a professional ever gets over, and who on earth would want her delivering their baby.
When my mother was doing her internship for her Master of Social Work, one of her fellow students, a very proper, prim, Southern woman, was working with sex offenders. Mom said her classmate came in upset, saying, “They’re fucking their kids, they’re fucking their dogs, they’re fucking their vacuum cleaners!”
Her reign was 1837-1901.
It’s also possible she was under anesthesia and/or other medication that would either distort, blur, or entirely erase her memory of what happened.