Igor ... Get me the brain!

At long last we made it to the Mock Surgery Day at one of our local hospitals. This is a great event, with the entire operating room area turned over to exhibitions (using non-gross models, of course) of various kinds of surgeries being performed, with videos showing the actual surgeries (grossness level, again, kept low), and nurses and techs aplenty answering various questions. Offspring #1 has for quite a long time been determined to grow up to be some combination of detective, FBI agent, and pathologist: basically, a crime scene investigator. We've avoided letting her know that there happens to be a popular TV series about exactly this profession. She's pretty much memorized Fisher's Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation (courtesy of our local used book store), befriended the sweet guy at church who recently retired from the FBI and has dozens of great war stories, talked me into starting a high school chemistry course with her, and was oh so eager to go see human insides, or at least convincing models thereof, at Mock Surgery Day.

We got through the cataract surgery exhibit, and were admiring the brute simplicity of bolting a plate to a broken fibia when dearest child suddenly keeled over in a dead faint, smacking her head nicely on the linoleum as she went down. So much for the brilliant career in medicine that was going to support me in my old age. At least she passed out in a room full of nurses.

So our study of biology and human anatomy will continue in less crowded and realistic circumstances. While we were still all vertical at Mock Surgery Day, she was admiring the medical posters up on the walls, and I have promised her the reward of a cool medical poster for each bodily system she can master, form and function, up to a reasonable high school level. She's opted for the brain, a choice perhaps not unconnected to her many questions about why exactly she fainted, and what happens when you faint, and what's the evolutionary use of fainting, anyhow? Though 'Diseases of the Digestive System' very nearly had first choice.

The desired poster is here, and she is swotting away (as they say in the UK) at the autonomic nervous sytem and the various lobes, occipital and parietal and the rest. Isaac Asimov wrote a nice little book about the brain in his wonderful "How Did We Find Out About...?" science series for children (I got hold of dozens of them for almost nothing; I do love library sales). Maybe I'll even go so far as to pay a butcher for a sheep or cow brain, and we can do some hands-on dissection.

While everyone is sitting down, of course.