Monsters

THE OLD VICTORIAN anatomy lab was the final resting place for hundreds of human remains, carefully dissected, labeled with pins, and floating eerily in jars of formalin. The pathological museum was once the crown jewel of the state’s oldest medical school, and a full century later, the jars remained. The specimens were long since obsolete, but what could be done with them? Their eerie glass gathered dust, and they became dismembered sentinels, staring out at each new generation of novice physicians.

There were babies among them—remnants of a once-prestigious embryology collection, lovingly curated at the turn of the century by the first woman medical school professor in Texas, the efficient and exacting Dr. Marie Charlotte Schaefer. In her eagerness to serve her alma mater, “the old lady,” as her students called her (though she was not old), had unwittingly condemned a generation of babies, grotesquely, to eternal infancy while their anguished mothers grew into old women, went gray, died, and were buried. She continued this labor of love for years, accumulating and preserving babies until she was taken ill on campus and died the same day, in the prime of her life, from an acute disease of the heart.

Years passed while the babies’ luckier brothers and sisters became children, grew into men and women, and even had children of their own. Now, even they lay peacefully under marble obelisks, lambs, or angels in the old Broadway Cemetery. On occasion, an industrious professor would select a baby for the subject of a short lecture, and more than one anxious maintenance man had shuffled the jars from place to place to make room for a new influx of students. But, for the most part, they remained undisturbed for more than a century.