Wellcome Collection

Oops, I got out of order on my blog backlog.  At the end of May, several of my colleges in the Occupational Therapy Department at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability organised an outing to the Wellcome Collection's Brains Exhibition at University College London.  The evening started at The Dolphin on Bidborough Street with a very reasonably priced pub Thai meal.  Anytime you find a reasonably priced meal in central London is a notable event.  On arrival we split up.  I was intrigued by two things in particular.  One was an ancient skull that had what looked like a hole scraped into it.  They had ancient tools along side it.  Apparently this is a practice called trephination and there is evidence that it was being done more than 8000 years ago.  I had no idea.  I always thought of the practice of cerebral shunting so sophisticated... apparently not so much.  The other thing that caught my attention was a surgical training film that showed a craniotomy.  I want to say it was from the 1930s but I cannot remember for sure.  I just remember that it was quite old.  I was struck by how little has actually changed.  I think another reason I found it fascinating was that I was looking at a living brain.  Well, OK, it was a film of a living brain.   Well, OK, it a film of a brain that was alive 80 years ago and is probably not any more, but it was living at the time.

Photo Credit:
Wellcome Collection