2024-05-11 17:17:42
You don’t wish for an emergency situation, but you need to think about it
Few people know that there is a medical museum in the dungeons of the Panevėžys Republican Hospital. It stores exhibits from various stages of the institution’s existence, there are even some that are almost a hundred years old.
Mindaugas Vaitkus, deputy director for medicine, accompanies us to the underground tunnels of the hospital.
One room of the former hiding place was given to the museum.
The hideout is separated from the network of tunnels by two extremely tight and impact-resistant iron doors. Behind them are wide corridors, pipes of various thicknesses are entwined on the deck, and medical beds are placed on the borders. A dozen ancient tarpaulin stretchers can also be seen.
“What we keep here may be morally outdated, but it may still be useful. We are not preparing for war, but little can happen. If there was an emergency, we would use those things. For example, a bus with several dozen people overturns on the bypass, there won’t be enough stretchers or beds for everyone, then the old ones would be useful,” explains M. Vaitkus.
The hospital does not throw away the white coats left over from the Soviet era either. According to the deputy, after all, the clothes don’t spoil, they don’t take up much space and they don’t ask for food, they could also be “employed” in case of trouble.
The hides are maintained, and their ventilation has been updated
We are opening the doors of the museum. The large room is crammed with antiquities.
“Many hospitals have their own museums, they usually collect used equipment and what they find inside patients. All these specimens are from our hospitals, nothing was bought”, the doctor indicates the exhibits of this museum.
White-painted iron medical cabinets – post-war, some furniture is even older.
The map of the region on the glass wall catches the eye. It was built in the Soviet era according to the requirements of civil protection, when the new hospital buildings with a network of tunnels connecting them and a hiding place were built.
The map marked where patients would need to be moved in case there was a gas attack or something else that made this hospital unable to function.
According to M. Vaitkaus, the premises of the hideout are not abandoned, they are still maintained, are ready for use, and the separate ventilation system has been updated.
“In the event of an emergency, the hospital will be ready to continue its activities, the departments would move to the basement,” says the doctor.
Doctors carried a radio to work
The non-standard length brown leather upholstered bench is not at all like an old used piece of furniture, although it was made in a similar way six decades ago and stood in the office of the then head of the hospital. You probably don’t have time to use it often. The mirror in the frame of massive dark wood is also from there.
The wooden cabinet, loaded with various documents, seems to have been made in the interwar period, only in Soviet times it was somehow “updated”, painted black.
A beautiful porcelain figurine sits on top of a post-war radio.
“These are now faceless doctors’ offices, they don’t have any decorations or personal items. In the past, doctors had all kinds of jewelry at work: some would bring a candle holder, some souvenir from their travels, a radio from home, they would listen to the news in the office,” explains M. Vaitkus.
Intestines and blood vessels – for learning
In the medical cabinet, the dentist’s tools, the maxillofacial surgeon’s supplies, the instruments used for examinations and operations by the throat and ear specialist are arranged.
On another shelf, there are long-term use glass syringes of various sizes with metal pistons and needles that have served until blunt. On top of the cabinet there are barbecue “seats” – dummies for learning how to administer medicine.
You can also see creepy colorful relief sculptures with a cross-section of the human body. One shows the entire circulatory system in detail, the other shows all the internal organs and the twisted intestines. They were intended for medical university students and nursing students.
“We still have those university students today, only the mock-ups are completely different, innovative,” smiles the doctor.
Although only middle-level doctors are trained at our city college, there are also future doctors from Vilnius and Kaunas universities at the Panevėžys hospital, who choose to do their internships here.
“A significant number of interns later come to work at our hospital,” says M. Vaitkus.
He considers V. Kuzma almost like a God
Part of the wall is studded with photographs of doctors, nurses and nurses who worked at various times. Two portraits enlarged.
“Here is Dr. Vladas Kuzma, the father of Lithuanian surgery. Any doctor who is interested in the history of surgery knows V. Kuzma as God. He, like many other doctors, was taken from the Panevėžys hospital by large centers in Vilnius and Kaunas,” explains the guide.
V. Kuzma worked at the Panevėžys hospital for only a couple of years between the wars, Kaunas seduced him. He was the pioneer of many surgical directions, the first in Lithuania to transfuse blood. As early as 1927, V. Kuzma began to do kidney, ureter, intestine, stomach, gall bladder transplantation experiments.
The second portrait is of Juoz Žemgulis, the head of the surgery department, who headed the hospital in 1940-1941. He, a medical officer, was arrested and brutally tortured in 1941 by the retreating enkavedists, together with surgeons A. Gudonis, S. Mačiuli and compassionate sister ZEKanis-Kanevičiene, for providing aid to the wounded.
Wooden clogs are already exhibits
Let’s go back to the exhibits. An old blood pressure machine is closed in a wooden box. Having served for more than half a century, it still works as well as it can.
“I’ve met doctors who still use them,” assures our guide.
And he explains why the ancient one is superior to the modern ones: the battery in the electronic meter has run out – and you can’t see it, there is no electrical outlet to plug it in – it’s also a stop, and this mechanical one works in all conditions.
In another wooden box is a microscope that was once used in a microbiology laboratory. The same ones, only of newer production, are still used today, when organ pathologies need to be examined from the biopsies taken.
The ancient anesthesia machine, which used to administer laughing gas to those undergoing surgery, is not at all similar to modern anesthesia equipment.
Where another box-like device with several glass containers was used cannot be guessed. After all, it’s a dialysis machine.
“This is a favorite, everyone remembers it,” quips the guide, pointing to an iron rod with a beautifully ornamented pedal.
It is a foot-operated dental drill. Tucked behind it is a wooden one, not really like a comfortable chair with armrests and a headrest. There, a throat doctor operated on angina.
A row of worn gray wooden clogs is lined up next to the equipment of the old gynecology office. For decades, it was the best shoe for operating surgeons.
Children swallow coins, adults swallow dental crowns
The strangest corner of the museum is “treasures” that have been swallowed, inserted into and pulled out by doctors from various openings.
Those that entered the patients’ stomachs through the mouth are closed in herbarium-like stands, the larger finds are lined up on an iron bed covered with glue.
Coins and bones stuck in the throat or esophagus during a meal lead the number of those swallowed. The most unexpected thing “eaten” is a five-pointed star, a glass pipette and a rather large clock.
“Strange little things are mostly swallowed by children, and adults accidentally swallow them by inhalation. I myself am a pulmonologist, having pulled out more than one swallowed denture or crown. The crown broke off while eating, the person inhaled – and it made a sound somewhere – this is what the patients say. They say I don’t feel much or anything, sometimes I just bite, but they care where that crown went. You take X-rays and see that you are lying in your lungs or that you have gone down”, says M. Vaitkus.
You see all kinds of strange things
Stones of impressive size were removed from the kidney and gall bladder immersed in several jars with formalin.
Creepy foreign bodies are three-pronged fishing hooks, usually pulled from fishermen’s fingers or other body parts because they got stuck in a careless cast.
The biggest foreign body that the surgeons from Panevėžys had to remove from the human body is a kitchen rake – a wooden rolling pin. The victim had to pull it from the exit hole.
The museum does not keep records of the circumstances and to which person such trouble happened.
There was a case where an electronic device ended up in the same place. During the examination, the doctors could not believe that such a thing could not be, it was simply impossible what the photo showed.
Nowadays, when crime has completely decreased, gang wars are a dark past, similar exhibits almost no longer complement the museum.
2024-05-11 17:17:42