Take a stroll through the exhibits of antique medical devices in the International Museum of Surgical Science on Lake Shore Drive, and your mind might conjure forth images worthy of the 1988 movie “Dead Ringers,” in which Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists with a creepy obsession with creating new and disturbing tools for their trade. At the very least, you may find your latent steampunker fascinated by the array of early X-ray machines, prosthetic devices, and I-can’t-believe-these-were-ever-legal drugs and potions. (belladonna cigarettes, anyone?) You can even see a real iron lung — and explain to the post-polio generation why it ever existed.
But the museum, founded by Dr. Max Thorek, has gone through many evolutions since opening in 1954 as a sort of hall of fame for the next-door International College of Surgeons — also founded by Thorek. (His name lives on at Thorek Hospital.) In the last 15 years, the museum, which attracts between 25,000 and 30,000 visitors annually, has expanded its appeal to art lovers as well as those fascinated by medical history.
Lindsey Thieman, manager of exhibits and programs, points out that the fine arts always had a role in the museum — the Hall of Murals and the Hall of Immortals on the second floor, which depict great moments and great figures in medical history through paintings and sculptures, were the first two permanent exhibits. But in 1998, as part of a larger effort to make the museum a destination for wider audiences and not just medical professionals, the staff instituted “Anatomy in the Gallery,” a series of contemporary-art exhibits on a range of medical and scientific themes.
Through March 10, the museum shows Alison Carey’s “New Kingdoms,” a series of photographs of sculpted fictional new life forms inspired by current experiments in tissue engineering.
“This is her sci-fi version of when these tissue-engineered beings escape the laboratory and take over the world in this post-human environment,” says Thieman, pointing to the cunning hybrids of flesh and plants conjured by Carey.
Since 2011, the museum has invested even more in integrating the arts with its permanent holdings through an artist-in-residence program. The current artist-in-residence, Annie Heckman, is a Chicago native and visiting assistant professor of art, media and design at DePaul University, as well as a founder of StepSister Press. Her fascination with the ancient practice of trephining, in which a hole is drilled into the skull — sometimes to relieve the pressure of subdural hematomas, sometimes as part of a mystical belief, as in Philip Pullman’s “Golden Compass” series of books — forms the basis for her current work, which will be featured in a show opening May 31 at the museum.
In a room open to the public and surrounded by Peruvian trephining tools and books, Heckman works at least one afternoon a week on site, creating drawings and collages that eventually will find their way into an original animated film with a score by composer/musician Jason L. Hoffman. One drawing uses an architectural series of jagged lines, inspired by the suture in a human skull.
Heckman, whose interest in images and ideas associated with the body and mortality grew following the premature death of her brother, found her nascent interest in trephination sparked even more when Thieman sent her a digitally preserved version of a film from the museum’s archives, depicting a trephination performed in 1962 by Dr. Francisco Grana of Lima, Peru. Grana, a member of the International College of Surgeons who was also of partial native descent, used the ancient trephining tools of Peruvian tribal people in a modern hospital setting.
The juxtapositions of antiquity and modernity, as well as rationality and emotion, lie at the heart of Heckman’s explorations, which began with what she called “brief prose poems” to the 31-year-old subject of Grana’s surgery who had suffered a blood clot on the brain following an injury. (He survived the trephination.)
“I really just began addressing the patient as the person who is being so brave to undergo something like this and to participate with a doctor on something like this,” says Heckman. Both Heckman and Thieman point out that trephining still occurs. “I had a med student come in just the other day who said, ‘I just did one,'” says Thieman.
The ongoing arts exhibits broaden the museum’s mission, but its intimate setting in a mansion designed by famed Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw is also a draw. “I was always interested in this museum because of its quirkiness,” says Heckman, who notes that at larger institutions, such as the Museum of Science and Industry, “you’re able to go and look at these specimens without necessarily connecting the dots about the human experience. And this is a museum where I found that kind of separation impossible.”
International Museum of Surgical Science
When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tue-Fri.; until 5 p.m. Sat-Sun
Where: International Museum of Surgical Science; 1524 N. Lake Shore Drive
Tickets: $7-$15; 312-642-6502 or imss.org
