Dark Medical Humor is Now a Crime
For those that don’t know, I was the editor and writer of the Placebo Journal for ten years. This was BEFORE social media and was in print only. Gomerblog came way after us as we ran from 2001-2011. I was very proud of this publication and we made FUN of everyone. We went after administrators, drug reps, Big Pharma, insurance companies, and yes, even some patients. But we did it in an a way that we felt was appropriate. Hey, if you can’t mock a narc seeker or malingerer than who can you mock?
This is why I was so sad to see this headline:
Two University of Pittsburgh students charged with abusing medical cadaver
Wow, I thought. This must have been bad. Here are the details:
The Post-Gazette says, “Witnesses observed (one) making sexual remarks about a male corpse and placing a hand inside its chest, while (the other) was seen inappropriately touching a female corpse, smirking and commenting, according to complaints against the students. Both told Pitt police they had learned in class about treating cadavers with respect, a detective wrote.”
Put them away for life!!!
Are you f%cking kidding me? The woke and politically correct have now officially destroyed dark medical humor. This same humor is used by these same medical students, residents and doctors to survive the unbelievable stressors of their job! Now, everyone in the medical community needs to keep their head on a swivel so they do not get reported. I promise this will only add to the burnout rate and suicide rate of physicians.
Sure, we can play devil’s advocate and go back and forth about the body being desecrated, which means treating something with violent disrespect. But is that what happened here? No way. Is there no room for cracking a joke anymore? And couldn’t these students have been “talked” to by the school instead of being CHARGED with a misdemeanor? That to me is a joke.
Political correctness and the woke have gone to far. May Karma hit these f%ckers where it hurts someday.
Idiots.
One time I heard someone mention a story of a medical student taking a cadaveric penis and perforned various acts with it, in a public men’s room. Waving it around, pulling it out of his fly and throwing it on the ground, can no longer recall the details. Various physicians remarked they had heard variations of the same story at a dozen or so medical schools over the country. I know I heard it in my anatomy class in the 1970’s, in a Midwestern school.
One of my anatomy professors, I recall at the time even mentioned the story to me, said he had heard the story in his PhD program in the South.
I wonder if it really happened somewhere, ever?
I remember at our med school in the South in one of the classes ahead of ours somebody put a cadaveric penis into one of the cadaveric vaginas, or so it was rumored. Equally disturbing, and I heard this was really true, somebody in a class later than mine hurled a big glass jar with a coronally sectioned head out of one of the anatomy floor windows. (Must have been some dumbass who was flunking anatomy. That said, my roommate flunked anatomy and had to dissect another body the following summer, and ended up being a terrific surgeon in the same town…As far as I know, in his mid-70s, he’s still doing some procedures.)
Ahhhhh, back in ’79 we’d make a comment on the boobs of the female cadavers and one very tall guy cadaver had a really big penis. The embalming fluids they saturated royally the bodies with made it large. Nobody did stupid stuff in my class except someone threw a toenail out the window. I just about puked myself when I saw that. The cadaver labs were always on the top floor of the building and had skylights to let as much light in as possible.
While this behavior is inappropriate, and the students should be counseled about the respect and appreciation they should show for those who donated their bodies, it is not criminal behavior. But these ridiculous criminal charges reflects the perverse attitude of the woke left and the cancel culture crowd. They are intolerant and full of hate, just waiting for the next opportunity to beat their chests over how they “made a difference.”
Who in the world reported those Pitt students to the cops, for cryin’ out loud? Will they be suspended from med school and their future careers ruined?? We named our cadaver “Ernest” in 1969 because we were working in “dead earnest”—would that be allowed now??
We didn’t name our cadaver but she was very petite. With all the embalming fluid they saturated in her, she weighed a ton to turn over. I didn’t realize somebody so small could weigh so much. May she rest in peace knowing that she taught 5 medical students about anatomy.
1. Right on, Pat.
2. In my medical school, along the main hallway from the lecture halls to the library, there were (are?) group photos of the classes, going back to the dawn of photography in the early 1800s. Many of the shots from the 1800s involve the guys (always guys, always with thick mustaches) holding skulls, femurs, and other bones, or standing around a cadaver, often in comical poses.
I guess they’d all get locked up these days.
To echo Pat, The number of people applying to go into medicine will slowly go down, as will the quality of the product.
That’s okay, they’ll flood the country with NP/PAs! Even though they are less educated, everyone knows they are BETTER than physicians! /s/
Not long ago, it was a crime to impersonate a physician.
The case study of “Shitty Life Syndrome” in your inaugural issue was absolutely legendary, and had every new and old-timer doc I shared it with absolutely howling (how many consecutive “normal TSH” tests?). You should update that now to include the dubious joys of social media and smart phones.
I know for a fact this sort of dark humor pervaded the University of Florida College of Medicine in my dad’s day, long before the Diversity, Inclusion, & Equity asswipes assaulted (see what I did there?) their way on to the curriculum. The stories I heard were hilarious, not meant to be shared with the lay public, and were born of a mentality shared by a self-selected group of students whose first day in class involved cutting up dead bodies. Sadly, this story isn’t even surprising any longer.
Why anyone would still consider medicine for a career, is.