Medical School

How an Atrial Septal Defect closure device actually works

Student 2: ...

🌐✨ Happy Star Wars Day ✨🌐 May the Fourth be with you! i♡histo Star Wars histology from top left, clockwise: 1. The Graafian follicle Death Star In a galaxy far, far away an intergalactic superweapon is halted in metaphase II of meiosis amid a surge in Luteinizing Hormone. 2. Jabba the Corpus Albicans “makingsa lee ka bok pateesa… beeska chata wnow kong bantha poodoo” (translation) “you may have been a good friend..but now you are bantha fodder” The corpus albicans is a structure in the ovary that is formed when the corpus luteum regresses. 3. Tusken Raider in the Liver Despite what you see here, Tusken Raiders are not native to the human liver. If you think that, then you are making a wookie mistake.

Head and Neck Dissection

Animated Anatomies

Animated Anatomies was curated by Valeria Finucci and Maurizio Rippa-Bonati with the assistance of Rachel Ingold and Meg Brown.

Animated Anatomies explores the visually stunning and technically complex genre of printed texts and illustrations known as anatomical flap books. These publications invite the viewer to participate in virtual autopsies, through the process of unfolding their movable leaves, simulating the act of human dissection. This exhibit traces the flap book genre beginning with early examples from the sixteenth century, to the colorful “golden age” of complex flaps of the nineteenth century, and finally to the common children’s pop-up anatomy books of today.

This display includes volumes from Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, the Duke Medical Center Library & Archives History of Medicine Collection and from the private collections of the curators of the exhibit, Professor Valeria Finucci, Director of Duke’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Professor Maurizio Rippa-Bonati, historian of medicine at the University of Padua.

Animated Anatomies is an exhibit on display in the Perkins Gallery, Perkins Library,  Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, from April 6-July 17, 2011, and in the History of Medicine Gallery in the Medical Center and Archives Library from April 13-July 17, 2011.

Anatomical Works Sculpted in Crystal and Glass

Santa Fe-based sculptor and jewelry designer Debra Baxter combines glass, bronze, crystal, wood, and found objects to create ghostly sculptures of human forms. 

For many of her recent works Baxter shares with Roq Larue Gallery that she drew inspiration from the phenomenon of the “Ghost Heart.” In this medical procedure, a heart is cleansed of all of its blood cells and then injected with hundreds of millions of new blood steam cells which cause the heart to begin beating again. Baxter is interested in how this concept explores the complexity of existence, walking the line between life and death.  

1. Catch Your Breath, 2021

2. Love Side, 2019

3. Cross My Heart (1), 2019

4. Cross My Heart (2), 2019

5. Love Hard, 2021

6. Holding Onto Black Metal, 2020

7. Heart of Gold, 2019

8. Ghost Hand, 2019

9. Silver Heart, 2019

A while back I had a COVID patient transferred to us from an OSH because they developed an interesting and complex complication from their COVID infection.

This person ended up developing retroperitoneal hematomas from lumbar arterial hemorrhages, presumably from endothelial damage and apoptosis from COVID. It should be known that this person was unvaccinated but had no other comorbidities associated with "bad" COVID infection. Also no other reason to explain the hemorrhaged (trauma, clotting factor problem, etc).

I admitted this person and they were a hot mess when they came in: on 3 pressors (while I was adding a 4th), hemorrhaging in the belly after one failed IR attempt to stop the bleeding, and gradually developing abdominal compartment syndrome from the massive about of blood in their belly. I spent the first 7 hours of my shift with this patient only because they were too unstable to go to imaging or IR without a provider present in case they coded. Literally followed them around with the box of blood product and just handing the nurse more blood. It was ridiculous.

They ended up going for an ex/lap and are doing better now. Long road ahead for recovery but they are alive.