Traveling with a Lisa Gags order
Today, we started and ended our day with macabre fully understanding the humours of the body by nightfall. We began the day in the Surgeon’s Hall Museum, as Edinburgh has one of the oldest Universities and was on the forefront of moving us from leeches and poultices towards semi-modern medicine practices with just a wee bit of bloodletting. In the 1500s, surgeon’s were part of the barber’s guild with podiatrists being part of the blacksmith guild. So back in the day, you could get a twofer, when someone’s cart ran over your leg by having your leg removed, while getting a bit off the top, as well. Hence the word barbaric! Whether a surgeon drilled a hole in your head, amputated any number of appendages or drained you of your body fluids, anesthesia had not been invented, which makes Johnny Walker the first Dr. Kevorkian. Universal precautions against infection included the surgeon wearing a tweed or cashmere overcoat. Harris Tweed scrubs likely ensured that if you lived through the surgery, you’d hope that dry cleaning’s mysterious martinizing process would save you from dying from a fabric swatch infection. Jonathan Lister created his namesake sanitizer saving mankind lives back then versus saving us from the blown up bathrooms of today. We headed upstairs to see the vast surgical specimens of the day. ‘Twas a veritable Jeffrey Dahmer all-you-can-eat buffet with jars of organs, limbs, and tumors. No wonder Fergus’s Haggis stand outside the museum went out of business. We saw many scoliotic skeletons; which were offered with or without rickets including one woman who’s spine could’ve monogrammed Shirley’s shirts and with her legs fused almost together. Calling all the single ladies, all the singles ladies, she died giving birth to her 2nd child proving there’s a lid for every knot. We stopped at the gift shop where Lisa brought some gangrenous toes for stocking stuffers for the kids. Quake will be getting an Innkeeper’s femur for a special Christmas gift.
We headed to Rose St., which has shops and Edinburgh’s pub crawl. If you had a pint in each place, you’d become a keg. We walked around the University of Edinburgh breathing in the academia with a hint of vomit just like at US Universities. We went to the highest rated restaurant in Edinburgh, the Devil’s Advocate, where I had soup with haggis made as a vegetarian option with vegetarian haggis. I think they probably messed up in the kitchen and just told me it was veggie lung, as it came from a sheep who was vegan. Regardless, it was excellent meaning that my pallet now has good lung capacity.
Finally, we closed out the trip at Mary King’s Close. How apropos, we closed at the close! The close is now an underground city, as the city center was built upon a 12 story building. The poor would live 12 to a 10×14 room with about a 5’ 6” ceiling with no light and all would share a bucket (not of chicken), but of shitting. The bucket could only be emptied 2x a day by the youngest child into the close or street. Cows were kept inside, so the British wouldn’t steal their cattle quadrupling the twice daily alley deposits. It almost makes United Airlines veal class look attractive. If I had to live in those conditions, I’d head to the surgeon for a proper drilling of my brain. Of course the unsanitary conditions led the unlucky inhabitants to either succumb to the Black Plague or the Bubonic Plague. If you ever find yourself reading a yelp review of plagues, the recommendations are in favor of the Bubonic Plague; which when you drain the lesions and you’d have a 50% survival rate versus the Black Death with a scant 5% survival of literally coughing your guts up. Either way, we could only give 3 stars to each plague, as the service and atmosphere both scored low. Finally, we learned that doctors believing in the bodies humours would test for diabetes by sipping some of the patient’s urine to taste for sugar. That’s why the Patron Saint of Physicians is Abbott Labs Test Strips. To think that today’s doctors bitch about putting records in an Electronic Medical Record. After a final walk past the Castle, we stuck a fork in Scotland with Lisa taking a connecting flight home and me taking a direct flight as I’ll get to the US before she!
Rubber Chicken 