There are two extremes of people out there at the moment. There are people who still indiscriminately touch handrails, ignore the communal hand sanitiser bottles outside shops, and sneeze anywhere other than their armpit. Then there’s the people who have developed some level of agoraphobia over the past few months: if they do leave the house, it's still only for essentials, and if you do see them grocery shopping you best believe they’re gloved up in hazmat-style garb.
We reckon the team from the Museum of Human Disease are probably the latter. As Sydney begins to open back up – with a number of museums, galleries and attractions opening back up – the doors at this quirky museum are staying firmly closed. Perhaps they have good reason to be wary about going back to life as usual – if you had access to over 2,500 human specimens affected by disease, maybe you’d feel the same.
Well, if you haven’t yet made the trip to this niche collection housed at the University of New South Wales, now is your chance to take a sticky-beak. The Museum of Human Disease has launched a virtual museum, allowing you to peruse its collection of disease-affected specimens like lungs, brains and body tissue.
“It’s so important to understand how diseases work – especially during a pandemic,” the museum director, Derek Williamson, said in a press release. “By learning more about past outbreaks and how they affect the body, we can also learn why some diseases are coming back.”
First set up in 1969, the museum used its specimens as training resources to help future doctors recognise and understand disease. While it has since opened to the morbidly curious among us in the general public, the museum is still used as a training resource for medical students.
Access to the virtual tour is by donation over on Eventbrite, with the proceeds going to support the work of the museum. Students and staff from UNSW can access it for free. Stay warned: if you’re less of a WebMD enthusiast and more the kind of person who can’t watch an episode of Embarrassing Bodies without feeling your dinner shift north, then maybe this one’s not for you.
