Medicine: Museum Piece

Manhattan copyreaders made bad jokes about womanhood last week when a lifesize, transparent figure of a woman, which had arrived from Germany, was placed on exhibition at the Museum of Science & Industry. Within this strange image, standing with outstretched arms, were visible a skeleton, most of the female internal organs, a complete set of blood vessels. The arteries were stained red. the veins blue. Since this was the only figure of its kind in the world and this was its first public appearance anywhere, appropriate ceremonies were held and an informal physiology lesson was radiocast. Present were Dr. Dean Dewitt Lewis, surgeon-in-chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital, Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews (dinosaur eggs) and Samuel Higby Camp, surgical bandage manufacturer of Jackson, Mich.

Highly skilled craftsmen of the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden have constructed four transparent men, one of which was shown at Chicago’s Century of Progress.— Desiring to sponsor the. first transparent woman, principally as an educational exhibit for the U. S. public and incidentally as an advertisement for his bandages, Mr. Camp, after being quoted a price reputed to be $20.000, told the Dresden artisans to go ahead. First, the skeleton of a young Dresden woman, killed in an accident, was treated with preservative, covered with paraffin. Brain, heart, stomach, lungs, thyroid, liver, spleen, pancreas, bladder and other organs were taken from corpses, made transparent by a secret process, dyed, photographed in color, enlarged, projected on a screen in three dimensions. From these projections artists made tracings which were used by sculptors to model the organs which actually went into the figure. The viscera as well as the glassy frame of the transparent woman are made of a material called cellhorn, which is tough, resilient, impervious to temperature and humidity.

The Camp Transparent Woman is not a robot in the sense of having movable parts, nor does any fluid circulate in her veins and arteries. Her virtue as an educational instrument is that each organ may be separately illuminated for the study of minute details. For this purpose the figure is equipped with 20 pairs of lamps. Since these are of only four volts each, the exhibit has its own motor-generator. No more than a few organs are lighted at one time, to avoid overheating.

After two months in Manhattan, the transparent woman will go to the Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons in Philadelphia, then to 100 U. S. cities where the public may see her free of charge. Eventually Mr. Camp will present her to a medical college or museum.

—This is now at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. The three others are in Buffalo, Stockholm, Dresden.