The liquid preservative is almost certainly formalin, which is stinky stuff and is believed to pose some carcinogenic risk, which is why pathology labs have concerns about releasing tissue that’s been soaking in it (the tissue could of course be rinsed to remove most formalin, and you could then preserve it at home in a bottle of tequila or something.
As for show-and-tell, we had a thoracic surgeon here once who would check out specimens from pathology to show school children. There are devices that will create a sealed plastic bag with tissue in a small amount of formalin, useful for demonstration/teaching purposes (our lab back in residency referred to these as “seal-a-meal” specimens).
It just occurred to me that I still have my dog’s bladder stones in a drawer somewhere. They’d make a nice paperweight, I suppose.
I used to have the screw that was used in my knee surgery around… I asked the surgeon for it when they went back in and took it out a year later. He cleaned it up and gave it to me in the post-removal follow up visit.
I think a big part of why they don’t let people keep amputated limbs is because they generally only amputate when there’s something like gangrene or in cases of extreme trauma, neither of which is something good to keep around, pickled or not.
That would be ex-Congressman and General Dan Sickles. He lost the leg (it wasn’t his arm) in the process of almost losing the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union. The leg was de-fleshed and he visited the bones on exhibit at what later became the National Library of Medicine Musuem on the former (not current ) site of Walter Reed in DC. That’d be the one on Georgia Avenue, not Wisconsin Avenue (which is the new, Bethesda site). In Sickles’ day, the museum collected in order to advance the then weak knowledge of medicine, particaularly on how to treat wounds and stuff.
You can visit it (the musuem, and the leg --which is still on display) today:
There’s a story (possibly urban legend) about med students who’d drive around scaring the bejesus out of toll takers by proffering money held by a cadaver arm stuck out a car window.
I always liked the part in Arrowsmith involving Cliff Clawson, the pancreas and the banker’s hat.
One company that I know of (unfortunately; one of their sites is one of our customers): Stericycle.
I hate going there to work. It looks/smells like there’s Hepatitis A thru Z on everything, and the stench…it’s the sort only a hungry buzzard could love.
It takes a long hot shower with lots of soap when I get home to feel clean again, and my clothes go immediately into the washer, with a double dose of laundry detergent and bleach.
ETA: I think I just threw up a little thinking about it.
My wife has an ancestor who lost an arm in the Civil War. He accused the doctor who amputated it of incompetence, as he felt that the break did not warrant high amputation. The doctor denied it. So my wife’s ancestor went out to the battle site and dug up his own arm, and went back and shoved it in the doctor’s face, proving to him that the break was too low to require high amputation.
