Yeah, I saw the “guy stewed in bathtub” pic, too. Purpler than you would have thought. Kinda put me off crock-pot cooking for awhile.
Coupla more disturbing pics I can think of…
[Possible grossout ahead. Fair warning.]
•Soviet-made footage of scientists keeping a dog’s head alive…severed from it’s body. It’s conscious, if a bit groggy.
•Similar Soviet footage, of dogs being deliberately drowned—strapped to some kind of harness, then dunked to the bottom of what looked if anything like a big fish tank—then ressusitated. I didn’t actually see the ressusitation, just what was apparently the same dog alive and happy in what was supposed to have been footage taken later. It was an edited-down film clip used in a different documentary, so who knows what was in the original.
•Fluoroscope footage. (Tell me I’m not the only one that this stuff creeps out.)
•The electrocution of Topsy the elephant.
•The picture of that elephant they supposedly hanged in Georga, in the 19th century. (It had killed someone. Probably some carny who had it coming anyway, but I digress.)
•And…anyone ever read that book Death Scenes? Blegh. There really weren’t any “good old days.”
You know, there’s a photographer out there who retouches photographs of still born babies so that they look like they were living when the photograph was taken (sort of, anyway). This photographer does this at the parents request! Very disturbing images to say the least. There was a thread about this (which is how I learned about it) and I am so not doing a search for it.
I don’t know if my link is work safe, but it’s on Snopes, so it should be okay, right? It’s a picture of a breast.
Try looking at this (fake) [url=http://www.snopes.com/photos/rash.asp]breast rash**. I certainly don’t need to anymore because no amount of soaps or abrasives can remove the image that has been permanently engraved into my mind.
I perceive a small contradiction here. What would the warning say?
Attention! Nasty, icky medical pictures enclosed.
Response: “Ah, but I’ve plenty of nasty and icky medical pictures, so no worries… (rip rip rip) AAAAAAGH!”
Maybe the warning should say “super-duper extra-nasty and extra-icky pictures beyond the average nasty and icky pictures you’ve seen, and we’re absolutely not kidding, uh-uh, no way, not at all, put your lunch down, we are not joking around here.”
For those who deal in these sorts of things (like the staff where I work) saying “graphic pictures of chronic, non-healing wounds” would be sufficient warning to allow one to either pass the pictures unseen to some unfortunate soul who really does have to look at this, or to prepare oneself mentally prior to actually viewing.
By the way - I did look at Goatse. Bad? HAH! Bunch of wussy wimps… Think Goatse with crawling maggots and stalactites of calcified puss and dangling shreds of beef jerky gone rotten and you might be a little closer to the mark…
When I was in about fourth grade. (nine years old, remember being nine years old?) My mother worked for a group called Birthright. If you don’t know they were (are?) an organization dedicated to stopping abortion. But unlike those assclowns today who blow shit up or shoot doctors they simply consuled against it to young women and tried to help with the expensies of having a baby.
Sounds nice huh.
There was also this slide show.
That I got to see when I was nine.
That when I was ten, my mother came to the school and gave the slide show presentation to the fifth, sixth, seventh and eigth grade classes.
Some of the photos I know now were fakes.
But some of them weren’t.
Abortion photos.
Photos of abortions specially chosen to make you NEVER EVER EVER even consider having an abortion ever.
[Broomstick], I so feel your pain. I think that in situations like that, the reason you work for a physician is so that you can get a valium and the afternoon off.
I once did research (note: research) administration work for a group of hematology docs. One day I opened up a fed ex box, which looked normal on the outside. Inside it was a styrofoam container of blood and broken glass, all nicely stirred up through the process of improper packing and the tender loving care of everyone who tosses boxes around airplanes. So I had a box cutter in one had and a lid to the box of blood in the other, and the certain knowledge that in moments of crisis I am a total physical spaz.
I managed to get up and put the box of blood on my bos’s desk, but I was way too young and innocent to think of valium and time off.
Well, the docs where I work don’t dispense any cool drugs, and anyhow, the FAA would take a dim view of even occassional Valium use in me. I just have to ride this stuff out.
I used to work for the Red Cross a LOOOOOOONG time ago - before we all knew what HIV was and stuff like that. Helped out with blood donations and yeah, them little baggies are tough but every once in awhile you’d get one that would break (probably factory defect in the bag) and it was a MESS! A pint goes a long way when spread out on your clothes and the floor, ya know? More annoying to me than anything else - I was usually on the clean-up crew. Let the co-workers who were turning green handle crowd control because that sort of thing could lead to a donor stampede.
Actually have a quite high tolerance for gore… dunno if the pictures caught me on a bad day or what. STILL incredibly gross.
Oh, god. That one is maybe the most disturbing image I’ve ever seen. No matter that it’s fake and I’ve seen the Snopes site that explains which images were combined to make it, I still can’t look at it without getting a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach. And I didn’t even flinch when I saw Goatse or Tubgirl.
I used to think I was tough, then I saw Tubgirl. It’s been a couple years and the image is still burned into my brain. If I lived alone and wanted to go on the diet to end all diets I wouldn’t stick pictures of a pig or a disapproving spouse on and in the refrigerator, as is done on TV. I’d stick up pictures of Tubgirl and the droopy guy on rotten whose body was discovered several months after he hanged himself. It would cure me of eating ever again. I can’t do it now because it would warp my children while my wife would dismiss it with, “I’ve seen worse. They can’t photograph the smell.”
Broomstick, warn me about the company. I’m married to a doc who does a lot of diabetes care so I would like warning before opening the mail the next time an envelope from Apligraft or whomever arrives.
BTW, it occurs to me that it needn’t be any worse than the normal Apligraft brochure to get its point across: Really bad ulcers = bad. This product = good.
I had never seen a harlequin fetus before. I made the mistake of looking at a picture. I seriously almost lost it. I couldn’t even really look. I seriously hope that’s a very rare case. My goodness. And the fake breast rash just made me shiver. I saw tubgirl and goatse a long time ago. Didn’t bother me as much. But right now, I feel faint.
And as every Doper keys that name into Google, let me just say that if I weren’t drunk at the moment, my lunch would be all over the place (not so sure if I can enjoy dinner, but I’ve got to try).
An interesting story, well-told. I always suspected you medical people took some sort of pill to be immune to this sort of thing. Make you seem quite human.
(OTOH, may I presume you showed them to nurses and others in our work area to see their reactions? If so, you share some of the fault here.)
