Graves Registration Service

[FC]

There was a guy in our church who was pretty messed up from his time with the Graves Registration Service in Vietnam. Here's a rough film on POWs burying Germans.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqK0nCnxpmI&has_verified=1

[FC]

What a horrible job! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5pHyWc6bTc

[AzRednek]

It’s gross but somebody had to do it. I know I couldn’t. 

[FC]

It would be mentally damaging.

[AzRednek]

5 hours ago, FC said:

It would be mentally damaging.

Back in the 70’s a friend’s son took a job in a morgue. It was a place dead bodies were stored until a mortuary claimed them or they went to the county. His son only lasted a couple weeks and had to quit after nightly nightmares. Years ago I had two dates with a mortician. She seemed normal in every way except talking about stiffs being merchandise and her claim of being a makeup artist. 

[Dr.Hess]

In the first week of Gross Anatomy in school, it was rough.  By the end of the semester, we'd be cutting the cadaver up, deep in brain or gut or whatever, 4 of us cadaver mates on a tank saying "Hey, what you doing for lunch?  Ya'll wanna go to The Original (Mexican) or the cafeteria?" 

[AzRednek]

1 hour ago, Dr.Hess said:

In the first week of Gross Anatomy in school, it was rough.  By the end of the semester, we'd be cutting the cadaver up, deep in brain or gut or whatever, 4 of us cadaver mates on a tank saying "Hey, what you doing for lunch?  Ya'll wanna go to The Original (Mexican) or the cafeteria?" 

Reminds of an experience in a Jr college class on automatic transmissions I took in the late 70’s. I shared a work bench with a MD that was a real car fanatic. He had nearly every JC Whitney gizmo imaginable on his LTD station wagon. On lab day we had to disassemble a tranny then after break put back together. During the break the instructor put an extra part on every bench. The Dr picked up on it right away when we discovered an extra thrush washer. He claimed in medical school teams were assigned to identify glands in cadavers. Their professor had earlier visited the Chicago stock yards slaughter house, picked up various animal parts and put the animal parts on every bench or into the cadavers during the lab break. 
 

Sometime in the 90’s some medical magazines were pressured by the Post Office to tone down their magazine covers or use a black plastic cover the same as the skin rags. I wasn’t there but at my station a woman passed out after seeing a medical magazine cover showing a dissected baby. Despite my projected red neck persona. I really felt what’s best described as sympathy pain. I mean I really felt pain after looking at a magazine named Vasectomy. The front cover had some guy’s gonads cut and pulled apart with pins stuck in parts with a flag label naming each part., I know it sounds silly but I really felt pain in my nuts. 

[Dr.Hess]

I would say that those types of images are really not appropriate for non-medical personnel and shouldn't be on a cover like that.  We had some fantastic dissections in  the Anatomy lab, in jars of formalin, pins and labels, etc.,  and some a hundred years old.  I hope they survived the last hurricane that took off the top floor of the building, where the Anatomy lab was.  It would be a real shame to lose an actual, real human cyclops.

[FC]

I thought I was going to puke. Bald, dead bodies in a stainless steel basin with the wonderful formalin smell!

[AzRednek]

I went to a medical museum in Philadelphia in the 90’s. They had a lot of weird stuff in jars and medical anomalies. My tour group had to wait as there were two groups of medical students ahead of us. There was a portion of the museum the general public was prohibited from going into but the medical students were allowed. When the guide was asked why her reply was some consider it pornography. I was a bit taken back by the appearance of some of the young medical students. Guess I’m used to the conservative dress of Dr’s in my generation. Some of the students had bold tattoos, piercings, strange makeup and hairdos. A lady in our group asked the guide are they going to be Dr’s she responded yep DO and MD’s and occasionally we get dental students too. The guide apologized for the wait saying the students are slow. They ask a lot of questions we don’t know the answers.