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Of course, anatomical experts and physicians from all over the United States (as well as Paris, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Vienna) told him it was impossible. But Weaver was a strong-minded Pennsylvanian, a Gettysburg native who had studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia, and was by then Hahnemann’s Professor of Anatomy. So he wasn’t about to let other people tell him what he couldn’t do with his own cadavers. So for five months, he toiled daily in the Hahnemann dissecting rooms, discarding flesh, muscle, tendon and bone, and leaving only the nerves, which he wrapped in gauze for protection. He then coated the strands of nerve fiber in white lead to preserve and strengthen them, and finally shellacked and mounted them in roughly human shape with hundreds of pins. It’s in this form that you can now see Harriet Cole. She stands like a sentinel in front of the security gate to the Hahnemann University library in Philadelphia. There, on the first floor, just inside the main entrance, her two blue plaster eyes stare out from a translucent amber skull. Everything else is a map of the human nervous system, intact, and made up of the real thing: A delicate filament of real-life nerves, coated in paint. |
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