Professor Sir Donald Harrison (DFNH) had a strong interest in comparative anatomy of the larynx, which was supported by a close relationship with the London Zoo who provided specimens from any mammals in the collection that died and had undergone a post-mortem. As I was increasingly deputed to collect the specimens from the zoo in Regent’s Park, I begged the entire heads so that the nose and sinuses might be included in what became a unique collection of specimens for anatomical study.
We couldn’t be picky about those which we took, unless the specimens were supernumerary (naked mole rats were sadly two a penny for reasons I never understood, as were lion cubs until the zoo reputedly started adding oral contraceptives to the lions’ drinking water), so sometimes the animal parts were not in the best of condition. This led to me loading an entire and very rare baby pygmy hippo into the boot of a close friend’s company BMW. A baby pygmy hippo which had been dead for some time, the smell of which was to impregnate the car’s soft furnishings in perpetuity. This met with some disapprobation when the car was returned to its owner and I had to promise never to carry a dead pygmy hippo in the boot again.
However, several months later I was contacted by the Natural History Museum who knew of my interest in the animal sinuses as I had previously studied some of their dry specimens. Would I like to have a collection of monkeys that were surplus to requirements, which had been found in a broom cupboard somewhere in the attics of the venerable Victorian Museum? How could I turn down such an offer? So, off I went again with the Beamer to collect a large dustbin of ‘dead monkeys various’, previously the property of the famous zoologist Lord Solly Zuckerman but now surplus to requirements and which had clearly been languishing for quite a long time in ancient formaldehyde. Let’s just say that there was a certain amount of spillage on the way back to the Institute, leaving an ‘eau de singe’ that was at least as pervasive as the odour of putrid pygmy hippo. Although I could honestly say that I had not broken my promise as no hippos were involved, I was never allowed to borrow the car again.
DFNH sometimes acquired specimens from further afield. He had been given the larynx of a famous racehorse as well as that of Guy the Gorilla, star of the London Zoo from 1947 to 1978, when the large primate sadly died under a general anaesthetic for drainage of a dental abscess. I once, by immense coincidence, ran into DFNH at Heathrow Airport arrivals, where we were both waiting for our luggage to be delivered to two adjacent carousels from widely different destinations. In his case, he had just come back from lecturing in South Africa; I from the Far East. He sidled up and confided in my ear that he had something quite unusual in his duffle bag – to wit, a foetal elephant. I still have no idea how he came by this item which clearly transgressed any number of importation regulations. He was, he told me, going to attach himself to a crowd of gossiping women in order to pass through customs as unobtrusively as possible, which indeed he did and I last saw him, enwreathed with smiles and surrounded by twittering ladies of a certain age gliding past the customs and excise officers.
Another zoological curiosity was a rhinoceros horn from an animal that had died of natural causes in one of the game parks in South Africa, which DFNH had been given, together with its larynx. DFNH was very friendly with one of the statesmen of American head and neck surgery, with whom he frequently exchanged correspondence.
The American, a man of senior years and some gravitas in appearance and clout, also fancied himself as a poet and, when he spoke, never used just one word when he could use 20. Not one to miss an opportunity, our professor had the horn embedded in a block of plastic and, at the next major American head and neck conference, very publicly presented it to his friend, in front of a slightly shocked but amused audience. Sometime later, DFNH received a very long letter and poems from his friend describing how he had met the new love of his life, a young musician, and how she would be his future soulmate. DFNH was highly entertained by this turn of events and, in response to this extensive epistle, he wrote one sentence: ‘Now is the time to break out the rhino horn!’
"I regularly plotted a route out of the galleries if and when the specimens came to life, preceding Night at the Museum by half a century*"
The mammalian collection was continuing to expand and a full-time technician was employed to decalcify and then section the specimens, first using a bandsaw and then a large microtome after the tissue was embedded in wax. For some time, DFNH’s own daughter, who had a degree in zoology, was also involved as the specimens provided a unique source of material for research and publication. The innervation of the giraffe larynx was one such paper [1], as there is a disparity of several feet between the length of the left recurrent laryngeal nerve and the right in the giraffe, which raised the issue of how the speed of nerve impulse is synchronised. It transpired that left recurrent laryngeal nerve contained a greater number of large, fast-conducting fibres to overcome this discrepancy.
Sir Donald was also interested in what happens to the larynx in cheetahs when they are running full pelt. It actually closes off. And both he and I were fascinated by the accessory sense of smell, the vomeronasal or Jacobson’s organ (VNO). As many of you know, this is largely concerned with the detection of pheromones – inhaled chemicals that play a role in the control of the menstrual cycle and ovulation – which connect to the brain via a different pathway from conventional smell perception: cranial nerve 0. The VNO is found at the front of the nose embedded in the nasal septum, often within a cartilaginous capsule and, in humans, was thought to be vestigial as there is little evidence of the structure at birth. However, experiments have shown that pheromones, if not the VNO, play important roles in the onset of menstruation, the response of women to men at the time of ovulation, partner selection and a host of other issues related to sexual attraction. I was invited to give a lecture entitled ‘Sex and the nose revisited’ at the Royal Society of Medicine a few years ago, such is the copious amount of information available on this topic. And in fact, a small pit can sometimes be seen on the septum where the VNO would likely have been situated, something that you might want to bear in mind when you are next doing a septoplasty!
Sometimes the specimen offered by the London Zoo was too large even for the bandsaw, such as a camel or zebra head but, ever keen on a challenge, we would manhandle it back to HQ and set about defleshing the skull. This involved placing the head in a very large pan full of water and a proprietary soap powder containing blue granules over a gas burner where it was left to slowly simmer over a number of days in one of the hospital basement hideaways. Eventually one was left with a rather beautiful ivory white skull, though I won’t describe the smell nor details of the clearing up involved. DFNH had expressed an interest in using dermestid beetles, small black flesh-eating beetles, reputedly favoured by museums and taxidermists. They are preferred to maggots as they cannot fly away at the end of their labours and are apparently able to demolish a buffalo head in 48 hours. Needless to say, I vetoed this proposal as I had an image of them escaping and running amok through our outpatients. Apparently – and quite disturbingly – dermestid beetle starter kits can now be bought quite cheaply on eBay.
With access to all this material, I was able to undertake an extensive study of the nose and sinuses, specifically concentrating on monkeys and higher primates. The study was building on the work of a well-known ENT surgeon, Victor Negus, whose book, The Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Nose and Paranasal Sinuses, published in 1958, was the benchmark on this topic. The project formed part of my postgraduate degree and involved me X-raying the preserved specimens in a small, and almost certainly unsafe, X-ray box and then sectioning them in various planes to provide a 3D appreciation of the anatomy.
Sometimes, given the rarity of some of the animals, even at the London Zoo, only skulls were available for study and I was allowed into the Natural History Museum to view and even, amazingly, to borrow material. This was an enormous thrill for me, a regular visitor to the museum as a child and, like so many, obsessed with the dinosaurs. I regularly plotted a route out of the galleries if and when the specimens came to life, preceding Night at the Museum by half a century*. Even more exciting, my visits as an adult involved mooching about alone in the uppermost private galleries of that eminent Victorian Gothic institution where large numbers of specimens were stored in massive metal cupboards, each one containing a mass of catalogued and labelled historical material. The skin, skeleton and other bits and bobs for each animal were carefully collected together with brown card labels, often in faded copperplate stating the date of collection and the collector. These labels provided a fascinating insight into the distant days of Victorian and Edwardian exploration, for example “Presented by Captain RG Carruthers from the Malay Peninsula expedition of May 1904”, though the acquisition had almost certainly led to the untimely demise of the poor animal.
I was able to borrow a whole range of large primate skulls to X-ray, which I duly returned and some of which, notably the chimpanzee and bonobo, share a close gross anatomical and genetic similarity to ourselves – especially in respect to their nose and sinuses – due to our common ancestry. Of course, quite a lot of the Natural History Museum’s unique 80-million-specimen collection is now stored in large warehouses in the Home Counties but I still wonder if Captain Carruther’s handiwork is to be found in those attic cupboards. Having access to behind-the-scenes of one of our greatest museums was one of the most fascinating experiences and a real privilege.
The Royal College of Surgeons of England traditionally ran a series of Christmas lectures, for the families of surgeons. Professor Harrison decided on the topic ‘Can animals speak?’ which would be illustrated by wet specimens of the animal larynges, a slide showing the animal in question and a recording of the animal’s voice. The latter was to be played on a reel-to-reel Grundig tape recorder by David (Howard) sitting at a small table on the podium. We had tried to persuade our professor to have the recordings edited to run sequentially on a cassette but he was having none of ‘new-fangled’ technology, so David had to fast forward the tape between each segment. As the Don moved on from the wolf to the brown bear, David advanced the recording only to see the tape jump the heads and fall in a whirl of ribbon onto the floor. As unobtrusively as possible, he wound the tape back onto the reel but of course he (and I) realised that now the number cues were all out of sync so as Prof Harrison, unaware of the debacle, asked for the brown bear, the high pitched squeak of a ground squirrel emerged from the tape recorder. The medical glitterati in the front row collapsed in laughter and things went from bad to worse as elephants were replaced by meercats and bushbabies masqueraded as dolphins. An ex-president of the college was led to remark that it had been one of the most hilarious lectures he had ever heard. Our professor was not amused.
So, the following year at a similar event at the Royal Society of Medicine, to avoid a repeat shambles Prof Harrison did agree to use a cassette recording, I dressed as Fay Wray and, to preserve his anonymity, David dressed as a small version of the King Kong gorilla to allow us to make a quick getaway if required – which, happily, it was not.
The fate of our unique collection posed a considerable problem with the demise of the hospital and a lack of space in the Institute. David spent several years of negotiation with various organisations including the Natural History Museum and other distinguished institutions before it found an excellent new home with the Behavioural Ecology Research Group, in the School of Life Science, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, where it has now been digitised with funding from our charity and intensively studied as part of a global project on the development of the human voice. So it was well worth all the effort, probably.
* Night at the Museum is a 2006 fantasy film based on a 1993 children’s book by Milan Trenc in which the museum exhibits come to life at night.
Reference
1. Harrison DFN. Fibre size frequency in the recurrent larvngeal nerves of man and giraffe. Acta Otolarvngol (Stockh) 1981;91(5–6):383–9.
This series of stories is dedicated to those of you with whom some of these moments were shared (or endured) and, above all, to my amazing and long-suffering husband, David Howard. Most of you know him as an exceptional head and neck surgeon but, since Covid, he has been involved in a large multi-speciality international charitable project reintroducing negative pressure non-invasive breathing support which could transform the management of respiratory disease all round the world. If you are interested, please visit www.exovent.org for further information and, if you enjoy the stories, please consider donating to the charity through the Exovent website (Click DONATE on the home page drop down menu).
