Medicine: The Sickest Jewelry

For the man who has had everything out, the thoughtful gift is obvious: cuff links set with brightly colored, plastic-encased models of his stone-laden gall bladder or ulcer-ravaged duodenum. Creator of “The World’s Sickest Looking Jewelry” is Dr. Robert G. Zach, a Monroe, Wis. radiologist who is convinced, after years of peering at tangled viscera on X-ray plates, that beauty is not only all around him but inside him. Taking inspiration from the delicately twined tubes, sacs and ducts he photographed, Zach set to work with a dentist’s drill and clear plastic, began passing out three-dimensional relief models of their innards to his friends.

Two and a half years ago he went commercial, farmed out subcontracts for the gruesome gewgaws to a few ex-patients, now makes more money peddling the trinkets than he does as a radiologist. Some of his bestselling designs: a coiled white intestinal tract with a bright red, about-to-burst appendix; gastric resection with or without ulcer; a uterus and Fallopian tubes with cancer of the cervix (available, like the rest of the doodads, as earrings) ; a Daliesque assortment of unblinking, bloodshot eyes.