An art museum might acquire a painting. A natural history museum might get a fossil.
At the Southern California Medical Museum in Pomona, they’ve been pinching themselves after landing an iron lung.
Yes, an iron lung, those mechanical respirators that enclosed patients from the neck down, especially people with polio. Hospital wards were crowded with iron lungs in the 1940s and ’50s. They helped patients breathe who were having trouble doing so on their own.
Vaccines have all but eradicated polio, and iron lungs faded away as technology and treatment improved.
At the museum, director Bert Davidson said he was after this particular iron lung for a year before a deal with Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey reached fruition. “They’re not very often available,” Davidson said. “This was rented out for movies. That’s why it’s in such good condition.”
I don’t know if it’s accurate to say museum officials are breathless about their iron lung. But they’re certainly pumped about their iron lung. They invited me over so they could show it off.
The museum, at 350 S. Garey Ave. downtown, is open only by appointment; contact Debbie Long at 909-273-6000 or dlong@sbcms.org to inquire. It’s in the Nursing Science Center at Western University of Health Sciences, a red brick building that used to be a Citizens Business Bank branch.
Docent Susan Wickham Purdy had tipped me off about the acquisition, correctly guessing my interest. She ushered me into the museum, where the iron lung was the centerpiece.
A life-sized girl doll is placed inside. She herself has a doll. (How meta.) Fictional get-well cards are displayed above her head, where she could read them, were she real.
An exhibit card makes up a back story for her: “This is Hope Goodman. It is 1952. She is 7 years old…Two days before she was playing with her friends in the school yard. Now she can hardly move her arms and legs and has difficulty breathing, so she went to the Southern California Medical Museum and was put in an iron lung…”
If the museum is waiting for the doll to begin breathing again on her own, it will have a long wait.
As Davidson explains it, polio was very infectious, but most people who got it merely thought they had the flu. A small percentage of cases were severe enough that patients had trouble breathing on their own, and sometimes lost the use of their limbs, Franklin Roosevelt being the best-known example.
The iron lung is only the latest, and largest, acquisition by the museum, which is dedicated to the history of medicine and is said to be the only museum of its kind in the Southland. Founded in 1982, the museum was originally on the grounds of the San Bernardino County Medical Society and moved in 2014 to Pomona at Western University’s invitation.
Of museum founder Merlin Hendricksen, a physician and philanthropist, Davidson deadpanned: “He had the same form of deafness I have: We can’t hear the word no.”
Davidson, 72, is a retired fertility specialist who loves to collect things. Most of the items are his, picked up from eBay, auction houses and flea markets, while others were donated.
“This is a beautiful museum. There are things you will not find anywhere else,” Davidson said.
We started at a case with a selection of stethoscopes, a device invented by a shy doctor who felt uncomfortable placing his ear against a patient’s chest. Hard contact lenses, as seen on one shelf, originally covered the entire eye, until a lens was broken and it was discovered that covering merely the iris was sufficient.
Pointing to a number of what resemble giant thumbtacks, Davidson said: “These are enemas that you sit on.” A card notes that they are “made of hard rubber.” I walked gingerly with Davidson into the next room.
“Here are some scary medical instruments,” Davidson said in front of another case, pointing out an item that might have come from a toilet tank. “See the one with the chain? The smaller one goes around hemorrhoids.”
Nearby was a Singer-brand surgical stitching instrument, which never caught on like its sewing machines, a variety of anesthetic types and a small amputation kit from the Civil War. Another case has Greco-Roman probes, sharp hooks and scalpels, devices that don’t look so different from today’s, only back then they were covered by Olympuscare.
A diorama behind glass shows a combination doctor-dentist’s office stocked with examining chairs and other items from circa 1920-’40. It’s enlivened by the life-sized figures of a doctor, a mother and the object of their attentions, her small son on crutches. I hope someday the boy gets to meet Hope Goodman. I think they would hit it off.
The avuncular Davidson believes that you can’t see where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been, and also that medical advances are part of a continuum. While medicine has made strides even in the few years since his retirement, he observed, “we’re only part of the way there.”
There are stumbles along the path. Some unusual items date to when electric current seemed like a cure-all, such as an “electric ear oscillator” and an electro-therapy device with, um, a “scrotal attachment.” At the Southern California Medical Museum, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wince.
Other items seen in the museum: circumcision tools, bone drills, blood transfusion kits, primitive birth control devices, lobotomy photos and ear trumpets.
“What’s that, Mr. Allen?”
I said EAR TRUMPETS!!
David Allen writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, quietly. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook, follow @davidallen909 on Twitter and buy “Getting Started” and “Pomona A to Z.”
