Little house of medical horrors

Mon, 10 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

There it was, staring at me out of a jar, the subject of one of the great presidential prevarications. No, it wasn't a Watergate smoking gun or even a Clintonian cigar. Just the cancerous growth taken out of Grover Cleveland's jawbone on July 1, 1893.

Back then, Cleveland had just been elected to his second, albeit nonconsecutive, term mostly because he wanted to make sure the country stayed on the gold standard. His vice president, Adlai Stevenson, was a silver man. So when doctors found Cleveland's cancer, they took him out on a yacht on Long Island Sound and told everyone he had a toothache -- just so Stevenson wouldn't seize power because of a medical emergency.

The ruse went undiscovered until 24 years later, when Dr. W.W. Keen, a Philadelphia doctor who had been on the surgical team, produced the tumor and told the dirty cancerous secret.

The jellied little Cleveland tumor is but one of a veritable midway of medical oddities and artifacts at the M|tter Museum,, a gothic little joint housed in the otherwise august American College of Physicians at a busy commercial corner in Center City Philadelphia.

Hotel Paradis-o

Thu, 30 Apr 1998 19:00:00 +0000

It was late. Too late to go back to Tokyo. Our guidebook had no information at all about Shin-Fuji, a small town between Osaka and Tokyo. From the railway station platform there was only one obvious place to stay, a five-story building a few blocks away. The sign on top advertised "Hotel, 6000 Yen."

When we arrived, there was no one at the front desk. There was no front desk -- just photos of the rooms along one wall. Two were illuminated, the rest were dark. We didn't know what to do. There was no one to ask. After four months of honeymoon travel on the road in Asia we were weary. We didn't have the energy to figure out another baffling cross-cultural situation.

A side door opened and an older man and a younger woman came in, all smiles and giddy. Unlike us, they had no luggage and seemed to know the routine. The man quickly withdrew a key from a cubby hole. The adjacent photo instantly went dark. Tittering, the couple disappeared into the elevator.

"What do we do?" my wife said. "There's only one room left."

Salon.com > Robert Strauss

Little house of medical horrors

Hotel Paradis-o