Buried Treasure

The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago holds many delights — an iron lung, a collection of old forceps, an X-ray shoe fitter. But none of them stuck with me quite like the glass case that held two fishbowls brimming with stones removed from people’s bodies. gallstones, kidney stones, and bladder stones. According to the placard, these were a gift from one Dr. S. Robert Freedman.

The display begs many questions. But let’s start with the obvious one: why? Why did Dr. Freedman keep so very many stones?

I don’t have an answer for you. Dr. Freedman passed away in 2021, so I can’t ask him about his motivation.

What I can say is that the urge to hold onto these stones is not uncommon, especially when they come from your own body. My mom kept her gallstones for decades after her gallbladder was removed in 1999. She wanted to see how big they were, so she asked the surgeon if she could have them, and he agreed. She threw them away just a few weeks ago when she found them in a box in the basement.

For some people, having the stones tucked away isn’t enough. One woman turned her gallstones into a necklace and then wrote an instructable for others interested in doing the same. (I’m not going to give you the link. I don’t want to encourage this kind of behavior. If you’re that motivated, you can surely Google the process.) On Facebook I found a woman asking how to preserve bladder stones from her friends’ tortoise in resin. On Reddit, a man asked if his large brown gallstone would be too soft to put in a rock tumbler.

I suppose we keep the stones from inside our bodies for the same reason we scrawl “I was here” on the wall of a bathroom stall. Life is so fleeting. We need hard evidence of our existence.

Image courtesy of me, Cassandra Willyard. Gallstones courtesy of Dr. S. Robert Freedman, pathologist.