If Paul Craig Baxendale didn’t have a girlfriend, it’d be easy to think he was trying to scare off women. His bedroom resembles what he calls a “1940s-era convalescent room.” A blood-pressure kit and stethoscope lie on a porcelain-coated steel instrument table that doubles as a nightstand. Eye and ear scopes are affixed to the wall within arm’s reach of his bed. An old-fashioned X-ray display illuminates a random set of ribs.
There are hospital museums all over the world, in such places as London, Bangalore, the Australian outback, and Indiana. But as far as Baxendale knows, his is the only one with a full-time tenant.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I figure almost everybody in the United States is born in a hospital or will die in a hospital or will end up in a hospital at some point,” says Baxendale. “I think it’s important for people to become familiar with hospitals as institutions and the history of them.”
Baxendale’s fascination with institutionalized medicine grew partly out of the pleasure of being laid up for a week in the hospital following his appendectomy, partly out of an interest in medicinal plants, and partly out of a love for the “medical aesthetic,” to which he was introduced as a child by a veterinarian uncle in Idaho. “I remember going into his office and the walls were crowded with old bottles of horse pills and strange stuff–big, big veterinary instruments. It looked like an old apothecary. The look of bottles and junk crammed onto the walls stuck with me.”
“The use of ether ushered in a new age of surgery,” Baxendale says. “Before ether they would get patients drunk on whiskey or bourbon and do the surgery as quickly as possible. When the doctors discovered ether, it allowed them to really slow down surgeries and be a lot more meticulous.”
Baxendale has a rationale. He says that without “an unlimited expense account or a group of wealthy trustees” enabling the purchase of expensive antiques, “creative representation of objects or historical occurrences can serve to temporarily fill gaps in a museum’s collection, while providing visitors with the information necessary to piece together an engaging historical picture.”
I ask what about it interests him.
