This week we went to the Museé du Fumer (smoking museum) to learn about the history of smoking in France and around the world. To the outside observer, the museum looked like an average smoke shop (it was), but hidden in the back were collections of antique pipes, oils, pictures and advertisements that told a unique story about smoking‘s cultural role through history. Smoking has been a social ritual since the very first civilizations; a “cultural icon” according to one poster in the museum. With a wall entirely dedicated to “smoking and the female image”, it’s hard to deny the impact cigarette smoking has had on our cultural perceptions. Indeed, smoking has been romanticized by many of our greatest cultural heroes (see picture below of celebrity-smoking-pictures-covered bathroom walls). One reason people think that the French continue to have a laisse-faire attitude toward smoking, despite the known health effects, is that they associate it with a sort of broken-artist image (Reed, 2016). France’s biggest heroes-Serge Gainsbourg, Brigitte Bardit, Django Reinhardt, Albert Camus-are all rather sullen, or broken in some artistic way, and all of them heavily smoke (Reed, 2016). Another theory behind the French’s attitude toward smoking is their rejection of broader society’s promotion of self-betterment (Reed, 2016). The French don’t like to be told what to do and besides, such an attitude is not conducive to art (Reed, 2016). Continue reading “Puff Puff Paris”
Class Visit Musee de Fumeur
The Musée du Fumeur is a private museum of smoking. The museum is located in a smoke shop. The collection contains smoking instruments including European pipes, 17th century clay pipes, Native American ceremonial pipes, hookahs, Chinese opium pipes, Egyptian sheeshas, and snuffboxes, as well as cigars, tobacco samples, hemp-fiber clothing, and etchings, portraits, photographs, videos, and scientific drawings of tobacco plants. Explained through the museum’s website, “the usual objects of the smoker in different places or times mingle with the smoked plants around the world: the tobacco leaves are side by side with the sinsemilla flowers; the sieve for extracting the hemp resin, the cigar mold and the briar mouthpiece accompany the fragile earthen pipes of the eighteenth century or copper, which Chinese dignitaries wore on their belts to smoke opium” (museum website). As elucidated by the museum website, smoking is a unison of both the culture of a civilization and the geographical, geological environment which encompasses a civilization. Smoking, in a sense, resembles the balance between an individual and his or her relationship with the place in the world that he/she is located, a representation of the active, two way dynamic between an individual and mother nature. Continue reading “Class Visit Musee de Fumeur”
Everyone Needs a Hector
During our visit to the Musée du Service de Santé des Armées, I spent a lot of time looking at glass bottles of old drugs, blood, and chloroform. While I had a blast, I had no idea that what would come next would blow my mind. On February 22, 1961, a little guy named Hector boarded a Véronique space craft, was shot into the atmosphere from the Sahara Desert, and remained in flight for 8 minutes and 10 seconds. Covered head to tail in electrodes and suited in what looks like a full-body strait jacket, Hector soared through the sky on his one-man space craft. Le Service de Santé des Armées wanted to send Hector up first to see how time spent in space effected the body…and it was a huge success! If you couldn’t tell by now, Hector was a rat and made his involuntary journey into space because this was the first time the French tried to send anything/anyone up. Like I said, Le Service was ecstatic because Hector made it back alive AND this was the first time in the WORLD anyone collected live recordings (from space!) from electrodes implanted in the cortex, the mesencephalic reticulate, and the neck muscles of a living animal. Thanks to Hector and a few others, this grand success was a huge win for Le Service de Santé des Armées, as they went on to share their findings with Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique. Continue reading “Everyone Needs a Hector”
Language in Neanderthals to Now
On Wednesday, June 13th, our Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology class visited the Musée de L’homme Exposition Néandertal. At the front entrance of the museum, there was a wall of signs saying “Welcome” in an assortment of different languages. Later on in the museum, there was an interactive activity in which we could wear headphones to try and emulate the language sounds of Neanderthals. Continue reading “Language in Neanderthals to Now”
A Visit to the Loire Valley
Last week, we took a day trip to the Loire Valley as a class. It was my first time outside of Paris in France, and it was refreshing to see open fields and the countryside on the way there. We got to visit two chateaus: Chateau de Chenonceau and Chateau de Chambord. Even though it was foggy and rainy, the view from Chateau de Chenonceau was amazing! The Chateau de Chambord had so much to explore. When we first got off the bus, there were goats and other animals around a barn area. Continuing down the path to the chateau, there was a river and a vast garden. The whole area was so pretty, it was hard to leave!
Figure 1. Me and my roommates at Chateau de Chambord. Continue reading “A Visit to the Loire Valley”
The Military Medicine Museum in Paris
On our last class excursion, we visited Musee Service de Sante des Armees, a military museum located at the center of Paris. Because it is located in a military hospital, there were always some security guards following us and making sure we don’t accidently go to the wrong places. The museum was created during the war of 1914-1918. The exhibitions presented the military medicine in French armies. There were lots of war related paintings and the museum also included collections related to health support of the armed forces, maxillary and facial surgery, underwater and aerospace medicine, infectious disease medicine. In the exhibition, I was surprised to see very original set of atropine auto-injector provided by the army pharmacy. During my ambulance clinical for emergency medicine technician certification, my preceptor, a paramedic, told me that they carry duodate auto-injector kit, which contains atropine and palidoxime chloride, in case of suspected nerve agent poisoning. In the museum, there were lots of collections related to emergency operations. I heard that physicians use to use nitrous oxide for anesthesia. Also, Chinese also used acupuncture for anesthesia. Since lots of modern medicine were improved from procedures performed during war time, what is the history of anesthesia?
Military operations Continue reading “The Military Medicine Museum in Paris”
Blog 5: A Visit to Val-de-Grâce and the Realities of War
The day before the last day of class, we had a visit to Val-de-Grâce, a military hospital that also has a museum dedicated to military medicine. While I was there, I saw many exhibits about things that we are currently familiar with being around us, like plastic surgery, or prosthesis… It is very interesting that these procedures were initially developed for the wounded soldiers and did not get their cosmetic place in the market until much later.
Continue reading “Blog 5: A Visit to Val-de-Grâce and the Realities of War”
Got Syphilis?
On Monday June 18th 2018, my fellow Neuroscience classmates and I attended the Musee des Moulages in Paris, France . The museum was filled with casts of various diseases that have dermatological signs, including syphilis. We walked into a big room with two floors; displays filled with various casts spanned from the ground to the ceiling on both floors. We started walking around the room and everyone reacted in disgust at least once or twice, at least I know I did. The casts were all super detailed and showed dermatological effects that I had never even seen before. I couldn’t even recognize some body parts due to the extreme growths that covered it. As I walked around to the back of the first floor, there was a whole back wall solely dedicated to representing the stages of syphilis. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take any photos in the museum, but it was really interesting to see how much of a dermatological effect that the different stages of syphilis could have. (There was even a cast of syphilis affecting the eyeball!) Continue reading “Got Syphilis?”
Don’t Eat That!
As someone who works as an EMT for Emory’s Emergency Medical Services (EEMS), I found our class excursion to the Musée Service de Santé des Armées really intriguing. There were many tools and displays detailing how emergency medicine existed in the past. I was actually surprised to see displays and models of how surgical rooms were set up and how similar they all were to the type of Operation Rooms we have nowadays. It was quite surprising to me to realize how although medical knowledge has very obviously changed and improved in the past couple hundred years, medical treatments and medications are still very similar. There’s a clear foundation in transportation measures and drug administration. For example, people still pack wounds with gauze, syringes are still used to administer some medications, and stretchers and wheelchairs in the current day and age are pretty similar to what we were shown in the museum. Even something like autoinjectors that quickly give a dose of epinephrine to someone having an anaphylaxis episode was around way longer than I had originally imagined. It was quite incredible to see how even though medications and the compounds within them change over time, the method of administering them is still very much the same.
International Neuroethics Conference & OECD Reflection
The last couple days our class spent attending the International Neuroethics Conference. It was an amazing experience as it was a privilege to be able to listen to some of the greatest minds today in science, technology, policy, and philosophy. To learn from them and also witness their exchanges with each other was nothing short of inspiring. It reminded me of just how interdisciplinary neuroscience can be, which was one of the major reasons I chose to major in this field in the first place.
The topics covered were varied. On the first day, Theory of Mind was discussed a lot, and obviously this was an excellent bridge between neuroscience and philosophy. Some of the most interesting studies were done in animals, and more and more research dictates that animals are much more intelligent and aware than we previously thought (Martin & Santos, 2016). The ethics of Deep Brain Stimulation was also discussed at length and I was amazed at the breadth of diseases and disorders that are already being treated by this procedure. Continue reading “International Neuroethics Conference & OECD Reflection”