8 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY NOVEMBER 30-DECEMBER 6, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com 831 When it was time to upgrade equipment at Salinas Valley Health in the 1980s, Dr. June Dunbar, chief of staff at the time, saw old, obsolete stuff going in the trash to make room for the new. “So she swiped it, and started sticking it in her garage,” says Shannon Graham, director of volunteer and health career services at SVH. That formed the original set of artifacts, but the extensive collection displayed in the basement level of the Sam Downing Building (under the parking garage) goes back much further than the ’80s. It includes an 18th- and 19th-century display, acquired for $50,000 and donated by the medical staff, then authenticated by a Carmel Valley antiques dealer. There’s a U-shaped amputation knife, and what looks like a bread knife—the “all-inone” Civil War amputation blade, with one side meant to cut flesh, the other to cut bone. Next to a steel saw, circa 1860-70, a placard reads, “This type of saw was used on skull, pelvis, shoulder blade, or, as with everything else in that era—wherever it worked.” There’s also more modern weird stuff. In the 1940s, Salinas Dr. Walter Farr removed an unknown number of appendices, roughly the size of your thumb—and several were sliced up into discs, preserved in paraffin wax, and the appendix slices are now on display. “Could one of these be yours?” the exhibit sign asks. Displays are grouped by specialty—an eyes/ears case, a surgery display, OB-GYN and so on—and one wall features five bedpans in different colors. A shelf is stacked with old pharmaceuticals, some glass vials still full. There’s Pesandrine Syrup with morphine, codeine and euphorbia; there are poison antidotes; and a product called Viriligen, promising on the label that it’s “a true physiological restorative in lowered virility of functional origin.” A giant urn is marked clearly as a relic of “quack” medicine. The Revigator, from around 1920, was a popular, radium-lined water crock. Can visitors get irradiated while observing? “Just a wee bit,” Walter Wagner says. Then he pulls out a geiger counter, moves it up to the plastic case, and it starts beeping. “It’s a miniscule amount of activity,” he says. (He carries the geiger counter most everywhere, so to him this frantic beeping—miniscule, he assures—is nothing to worry about.) Wagner, formerly a medical physicist, donated this Revigator to the SVH collection. “It was a huge component of quackery back in the day,” he says. Next to it is a mockup of an oldtimey doctor’s office—basically a residential living room—with the names Dr. Henry Murphy and Dr. Rollin Reeves across the glass. They are Wagner’s great-uncle and a cousin of his great-uncle, a family business. Reeves built the 32-bed Salinas Valley Hospital in 1926 and charged patients $8 per day per room. The medical evolution from then until SVH was built in 1953 was fast—and so is the evolution both before and after that. The arc of some of that progress is obvious here. Horsehair, used for stitches instead of cotton or silk thread in some Civil War-era surgeries, was for a time viewed to have superior healing properties—until providers realized it was not the material but the fact that it was boiled to soften it, therefore also sterilizing it, that improved outcomes. Graham works with volunteer docents who lead tours, primarily for elementary school students, who she says find themselves intrigued even if they don’t think they care about medicine. “That’s really the point of this place, to instill curiosity,” she says. (As for those students who say they are interested in health care and ask for advice, Graham recommends simply: “Pay attention in math and science.”) “Dr. Dunbar saw that this stuff has historic value,” Wagner says. “It’s education—it shows changes and improvements, and that there is still room for improvement.” The Medical History Museum is open 9am-5pm Monday-Friday, and by appointment. Salinas Valley Health, 450 E. Romie Lane, Salinas. Free. 755-0772, salinasvalleyhealth.com. Doctor’s Orders A medical history museum at Salinas Valley Health documents the old, the weird and the discredited. By Sara Rubin One interactive exhibit is an old-school docotor’s bag that invites visitors to pull out stethoscopes and other tools. “It looks just like my dad’s old bag,” says Walter Wagner, who donated an item to the museum’s collection. “It was a huge component of quackery.” TALES FROM THE AREA CODE DANIEL DREIFUSS
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