Case #161207, Dr. Lionel Elliot
Release date: September 1st, 2016
First listen: 6th November, walk home. Definitely remember crossing over the canal bridge.
The Anatomy Students… I love them… I think in the late 20s early 30s episodes, this podcast went from, ‘oh this is interesting, I’m enjoying this’ to ‘… oh this is really good… oh no… this may be a problem…’ And I was right! The Anatomy Class episode was one of those moments that really stands out in my memory.
- Off the bat, we’ve got a live recording, so that helps us with the time frame a bit more. Recording taken on the 12th July, and looking back MAG022 was recorded 12th March… Martin’s been living in the institute for 4 MONTHS?!? The worms have been happening for 4 months!??! How many stomach ulcers are in the making right now? Good grief, no wonder everyone is exhausted, they’re all stressed out of their minds. Wonder how many times Jon has glimpsed Martin in his pants?
- While it’s refreshing to not have someone instantly condemn the tape recorder, and as someone who still uses a filofax I appreciate it, I don’t much care for his tone when talking about the advancements being made in medicine with the use of robotics. It’s well above my understanding but I always enjoy listening to my sister and her fiancee talking about new methods and techniques. These fields are all about saving lives and while this doctor may want to ‘feel that pancreas’, his patient will most definitely want to be alive to use that pancreas, and the body may not survive a full ‘popping of the bonnet’ shall we say. I’m just getting a bit of ‘OK boomer’. ‘Meh, devices, mehmeh.’
- I know there’s a bit of a stereotype with surgeons of jumping immediately to the slicing and dicing… but I don’t think it is unwarranted.
- It’s getting to the stage where the worms are being noticed by visitors, yikes. Also, ‘Bitten? They’re worms.’ Mate, when was the last time you handled an infectious diseases or parasitology case, huh?
- ‘Where, where do you want me to start? The bones? The blood? The… uh… the fruit?’ … Well, that smacks of both divinity and butchery…
- ‘Introduction to Human Anatomy and Physiology… At King’s College, London.’ So I looked up the module course online and it does exist. It may have been different in 2016, when this was releases and presumably written, but this happened to Dr Elliott ‘in early 2016’. The website sates that this module is taught in the autumn semester.
- Now, I’m looking at this 8 year, Christ 8 years?!, in the future and we are in a post-lockdown/continual-Covid world, so teaching methods have changed, but I’m looking at the module summary and I don’t know how Dr Elliot would take it:
‘The use of computer-assisted learning (Anatomy & Physiology Online, Primal Pictures) during tutorial sessions will enable the students to learn using virtual 3D representations taken from the Visible Human data set … There will be 2 lab sessions that will be assessed from the experimental write-ups. Also there will be 2 sessions in the dissection room to facilitate learning about the skeleton and the cardiovascular system.’
Think it’s a little more remote learning then he’d be comfortable with… comfortable with any other year than 2016 that is.
- ‘I get tired of… squeamish students’… These kids want to learn, are putting themselves in financial straits to do so and I will hear no judgement against them. You build a resilience to this sort of thing, heavens knows I did, and it takes time and exposure. Don’t be rude.
- ‘Spillover class’. points at the academic schedule not making sense and then back at this paragraph Ooooh, cool, it’s covered in universe. ‘… the system had accepted more students for the course than there were places’, sooo this kinda happened to me, but with accommodation rather than tuition. So I spent first year in international, post grad halls… That sucked…
- ‘I have a lot of research due shortly and, well, you know academia – never enough hours in the day.’ I can only imagine, what sort of haggard wreck Jon is starting to look like at this stage in the series. He’s not got the iconic scars yet, but I bet he’s not been looking after himself. He possibly felt a little bit of camaraderie with Dr Elliott, clinging to veil of academia the way he does, but knowing how prickly Jon can be, he could just as easily take affront at the over familiarity.
- ‘I wasn’t responsible for any of the lectures…’ I wonder if those lectures were attended, or if they were ever even scheduled…
- ‘… but I don’t remember what they look like.’ mii theme song playing in the background Blank slates all of them.
- ‘…maybe because they were such an international group.’ I. LOVE. THEIR. NAMES. Fucking love this Jonny, you clever sod.
- Erika Mustermann – German
- Jan Novak – Czech
- Piotr and Pavel Petrov – Russian
- John Doe – English
- Fulan al-Fulani – Arabic
- Juan Pérez – Latin American Spanish
All place holder names in different cultures, you clever, clever bastard.
- The fact that he says ‘14 eyes’ instead of ‘7 pairs of eyes’ is weird.
- ‘I got the oddest feeling they were judging my walk.’ Must learn from teacher. Observe, learn, imitate.
- I find the whole ‘building the interior as they learn about it’, just, so cool and clever concept. They can observe a person and get the build and the movement but learning how the components fit together and interact and everything? Excellent, brilliant, ugh I love it.
- ‘…their breathing deliberate and almost pointed.’ ‘Look. We have learned. Are we doing it right?’
- ‘How sharp are the knees meant to be?’ They’re babies. Teach and guide these abomination babies.
- ‘I just did my best to stop caring.’ How many statements are going to carry this sentiment? That at some point or another, the subject is just going to ‘nope’ right out and make it through? I’m going to have to start a tally.
- ‘Their faces, normally so neutral, were alive with… what was it I saw? Excitement? Curiosity? Hunger?’ THEY’RE BABIES!
- They are effectively playing ‘dress up’… with skeletal remains… I love them.
- They are such diligent students. There ever tutorial, ready to learn, even if the lecturer isn’t there.
- Hearts… Ooof… let the ‘sinister nonsense’ begin.
- ‘Maybe I thought they’d descend into some sort of feeding frenzy, but they didn’t.’ Well, that is both rude and hurtful. Actually, to be fair, I did once ask about taking pheasants we’d been dissecting in lab home for cooking… There were about 4 of us who were watching about 20 odd bird carcasses just getting discarded going ‘umm… I could curry that… sure I can’t take it? Oh, ok…’
- ‘… that if I couldn’t see or hear it, I didn’t care.’ Very ‘child hiding behind a curtain, if I can’t see them they can’t see me’ mentality.
- Again, I ask, ‘Where does the blood COME FROM?!’
- I think the whole situation can be described succinctly as ‘horrible miracle’, I think Dr Elliott was right on the money there.
- ‘I asked Elena and, irregular as it was, she gave me the address.’ Well, THAT feels like a safe guarding violation…
- Kingsland Road in Newham. I thought for a moment maybe the Anatomy Students and Sarah Baldwin and the others taken by The Anglerfish all lived together, but Melanie picked Sarah up from Sydenham in MAG028, which is the other side of the river by quite a distance. ‘…and the details have disappeared from the college systems.’ Clean up.
- ‘I was about to reply when a muffled scream of pain came from somewhere deep inside the house.’ Oh God… I’d completely forgotten they’d gone in search of, umm, ‘additional educatioal material’. Oh dear… Bad babies…
- ‘And the apple, did you… eat it? / Do I look like an idiot? Of course not! I cut it in half, first, to check if it was… off.’ I can only hope you are speaking euphemistically and it was your morbid curiosity that prompted you to cut the apple open and that you had exactly zero intentions of actually eating it because GOOD GRIEF MAN!
- And again, human teeth where there ought not to be human teeth. To be fair to Jonny, teeth are fucking weird.
- ‘The first thing about this statement that makes me dubious is that it comes from a fellow academic.’ HA! Oh Jonathan, my sweet, self aware boy… Oh… Oh, I thought this may be a commentary on the ‘ivory tower of academia’ concept, but actually it’s because they’re so used to getting bullied by other nerds…
- ‘It seems strange to me that Dr. Elliott would fail to take note of this.’ And indeed this could be a point in the ‘the other nerds are being mean to us’ column, but I think it also may be down to how focused and, sometimes insular circles of academia can be, the fact that this was missed by Dr Elliott.
- ‘… but Tim seems to believe her.’ And we believe Tim. Tim is the best.
- ‘… they all seemed like healthy adult teeth, and most of them appeared to come from different people.’ Are they… umm… are they samples taken from the ‘samples’ that the anatomy students were sourcing?
- ‘… early last year, Dr. Rashid Sadana took his own life. There’s no direct connection, except that he taught the Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology for Complementary Therapies course at St. Mary’s University…’ Well, they’re doing their studies, they went and got their pre-requisites…
