Week of July 23-27

The week in Bonn with the trip to Hannover, Emden and Nordeney was a pleasant one.  Monday we learned about the history of anesthesia and then visited the Museum of Anesthesiology.  Dr. Stoeckel gave the tour and it was incredibly enjoyable.  My favorite part was the iron lung as well as the operating room exhibit from the 1930s.  Learning about anesthesiology made me want to visit the Ether Dome in Boston and also gave me a new perspective on anesthesiology.  I previously and wrongly thought anesthesiology was a rather boring specialty.

Later on in the week we visited Hannover, a small but very medical town home to the MHH, the Harvard of medical schools in Germany.  At the MHH we heard from two extremely interesting doctors, Dr. Schmitto and Dr. Kielstein.  Dr. Schmitto was a cardiovascular surgeon who talked a lot about artificial hearts and how doctors are currently treating cardiomyopathies.  I loved learning about how doctors use biomedical equipment because it was a great connection between my interests in biomedical engineering and premedicine.  The need for innovation in biomedical equipment still exists, especially for the heart, since a transplant is still better than an artificial heart.  The other thing that was interesting about Dr. Schmitto’s lecture was that a patient with an artificial heart spoke to us about life with the device.  Dr. Kielstein was a nephrologist and spoke to us about the German health care system and about dialysis.  I think that after this trip I will know more about the German system than the American system..  Watching a patient go through the process of hemodialysis made me really see how the development of an artificial kidney would benefit society.  It made me thankful for the kidney device design project we did in VTPP 435.

A trip to Nordeney ended the week on a wonderful note.  We visited a rehab center for patients with lung and skin diseases.  I will admit I was a bit skeptical about the need for this clinic but after seeing graphs of the results the patients see after only three weeks, I was totally on board.  I would have loved to have to go there and spend a day getting the mud therapy or a nice massage.