San Diego Magazine / January 2011 / Strange Bones

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Strange Bones

The San Diego Museum of Man's latest exhibit is a modern freak show

“Don’t stare.” How many mothers have whispered these words to their children? Despite the bounds of polite society, we do not outgrow this deviant impulse to gape at strangeness.

Long before modern America went agog over political correctness, our nation used to be far less apologetic for its nastier tastes, particularly at the turn of the 20th century. Crowds flocked to carnivals and circuses for the chance to view members of traveling freak shows. People were advertised as grotesqueries. Curtains raised on parasitic twins, bearded ladies, dwarves, hermaphrodites, albinos and other human oddities. Gradually this exploitation fell out of favor with the masses as abnormalities were destigmatized by breakthroughs in science.

In this spirit of fascination with the the human form, the San Diego Museum of Man lifts the shroud off Strange Bones: Curiosities of the Human Skeleton.

Running until September 2011, the exhibit is drawn from three sources: the Hrdlička Paleopathology Collection, the Stanford-Meyer Osteopathology Collection and the Boring Collection of Human Skeletal Anatomy. Plexiglas encases sets of bones in nine categories that include Types of Bone, Age-Related Pathology, Healed Traumatic Injuries, Cultural Modifications, Habitual Activities, Congenital Anomalies, Disfiguring Diseases, Nutritional Deficiencies and Infectious Diseases.

The exhibit aptly begins with a description of Wolf’s Law, developed by the German surgeon/anatomist in the 19th century: Living bone tissue adapts in proportion to its unique load. For instance, bone dissolves or regenerates through transformative mechanisms of need. Not only are our skeletons the keystones of movement, structure and protection, they are dynamic remodelers. More than 300 bones at birth fuse into 206 at final tally. Five types—flat, long, short, irregular, sesamoid—exist in the human body. In death, bones can unlock clues about culture, age, trauma and disease.

Biological engineering aside, cultural modifications reflect paragons of beauty and status. As a symbol of elitism, Mayan women inlaid teeth with circular pieces of jadeite and hematite.

“They’re flashy; they would be polished and shine,” says SDSU assistant professor of anthropology Arion Mayes in the latest installment of the exhibit’s Lecture Series. “So when you’re smiling at someone, you’d see them and they’d reflect. In this time period, throughout Mesoamerica, materials that reflect are what we call ‘mirrors’—actual portals to the other world. These are ancient grills that would flash.”

Senegalese and Peruvian customs identify group affiliation or social standing by binding underdeveloped skulls at birth to achieve cranial deformation. Specimens from Peru have conical, rounded and widened shapes. In northwestern Burma, clavicles and ribcages are forced downward by Padaung women who stack brass rings around elongated necks to signify wealth and elegance.

Equally agonizing, for a thousand years until the mid-20th century, young Chinese girls stunted foot growth with the cultural practice of footbinding. To display aesthetic and upper-class eminence, toes were broken and thereby wedged underfoot in tightly wrapped bandages. “The point was to make it look like a golden lotus, a little flower,” says Mayes. “A horizontal foot becomes a vertical foot.”

Before gastric bypass came into vogue, trimming one’s waistline was a simple matter of tightlacing, or the prolonged use of a cinched corset—in combination with excruciating pain, shallow breathing, organ reorganization, inordinate flatulence and in many cases, broken ribs.

Curator Tori Randall is intrigued by the section reserved for traumatic head injuries, culled exclusively from the Hrdlička Collection. “There are a lot of really cool specimens,” she says. A large upright case houses at least nine skulls with evidence of blunt-force fractures or trephination, a primitive surgical method of cranial bone excision.

A row of broken femurs illustrates bone tissue’s ability to recover from traumatic injuries at varying degrees of severity. Snapped at mid-shaft, a previously straight femur has mended with the curve of a boomerang. Nearby, a lifesaving rib has partially swallowed a bullet.

“Bone is a living tissue — it’s different from teeth,” Randall says. “If you break a tooth, you’re in trouble and you have to go to the dentist. But bone will fix itself. Ideally you want it to be healing properly and set in the right place. But even if you don’t, it will eventually heal.”

As late as the Victorian era, when women’s contraceptives may have contained splinters, and poisonous metals were considered medicinal, venereal diseases were widespread. Until penicillin, one syphilis treatment prescribed the ingestion of mercury, which spawned the following colloquialism. “A night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury.” At the SDMoM, this virulent STD bores blackish holes into the skull vault, or forehead. Similarly attacking skulls, Leishmaniasis is an infectious scourge that’s transmitted via sandfly bites. Destructive lesions chomp through bone like sponge cake.

The final unlucky sufferer experienced Myositis ossificans progressiva. A crippling hereditary disease, it starts with localized rigidity of motion and ends with near total immobility. “All the connective tissue turns to bone,” Randall says. In addition, this specimen carries a special distinction within the exhibit. “It’s the first time it’s ever been displayed.”

619-239-2001, museumofman.org