The Mega Colon! (Jan 4th)

Of all the things I thought I would learn during my trip to Germany, I would never have guess that I would have learned how to intubate a person.  Or suture skin.  This all happened when we visited the Charite hospital in Berlin two days ago.  We toured the hospital with two medical students and during our time there, we got to practice some basic clinical skills.  I winced empathetically for my “patients” wound, as my stitching isn’t the smoothest.

After this tour we went to the hospitals pathology building, where we saw a wide array of anatomical collections and learned a brief overview of how diseases were treated in the past.  If you haven’t taken a moment to appreciate the existence of anesthesia if you need to have a tooth pulled or a wound stitched, you might consider doing so.  Not only were surgeries of the past excruciatingly painful experiences, but the overall process of medical diagnosis and treatment was completely bizarre.  Basic principles of Western medicine (i.e. evidence-based medicine) was essentially nonexistent until only two and a half centuries ago.  Methods before this time were based on assumptions from Hippocrates, who simply crafted this farcical vision of how the body worked, essentially ensuring a painful, laborious, and ineffective treatment.  The main components of the body were believed to be blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Illnesses were believed to come about from the imbalance of these fluids.  This means that “doctors” might try to treat your wound by stitching hay into your wound and sowing it into your body because this would generate puss, meaning that you were restoring balance to a yellow bile excess.  Really what they were doing was causing an infection as the hay decomposed in the body.  Needless to say, medicine has become a science, and we are incredibly lucky to be alive in this day and age.

One of the creepier moments of the entire trip was the anatomical collections of the Charite.  Some of the specimens were from healthy people, while others were bizarre like the “mega colon,” weighing in at over 20 kilograms.  Bleh!

A visit to the beautiful city of Dresden showcased the history of this country.  Apparently, residents of the town believed that they would be spared an Allied bombing raid because of the beauty of their city.  Having just been there, I can understand why they would have thought this.  History, of course, tells us that Dresden was one of the more unfortunate cities of World War II, suffering a firebombing that killed over 30,000 people.  Most of the city was razed, but many of the buildings there now have been rebuilt, some using what portions of the old buildings that could still be kept.   That being said, much of the city is very young, and the main cathedral was only rebuilt in 2006, which is a testament to the lack of Soviet attention to German culture (or religion for that matter).

Other things that we’ve been up to in Germany?  Drinking beer and eating doner, a meal invented by the Turkish immigrants of Berlin.  Beer in Germany is fantastic.  This is worth mentioning.  I would write more but I’d prefer to not sound like an alcoholic.

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Okay, so beer is cheaper than water here, which is a little hilarious, to say the least.  Personal favorites: Franziskaner Hefeweizen and the Erdinger Pilsner.