Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 8, 1990 TAG: 9006080571
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK LAYMAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's likely that the three preserved heads found in the basement of a house on Mountain Avenue in Southwest Roanoke came from the Gill Memorial Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Clinic years ago.
Dr. Richard H. Fisher, the Lewis-Gale Clinic physician who owns the house, said Thursday that he bought the stately brick manor eight or nine years ago "from a group of physicians belonging to an ear, nose and throat clinic."
Fisher wouldn't name the clinic.
But that jibes with a story told by an anonymous caller to the Roanoke Times & World-News.
The caller said that when his wife worked at Gill Memorial in the early 1970s, she heard that the preserved heads of state prisoners were stored in the basement. When she asked to see the heads, she was told they had been moved to a house on Mountain Avenue that was owned by a doctor at the clinic.
When a maintenance man discovered the heads on Wednesday, it didn't occur to Fisher that they might have come from the clinic. "I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier," he said Thursday. "I was just so taken aback."
But after returning from an out-of-town trip Thursday night, he called one of the doctors he had purchased the house from. The doctor told him the heads had been moved there while the clinic was being expanded in the 1960s. They were forgotten "in all the hubbub," Fisher said.
Fisher has found other medical paraphernalia in the basement over the years, including eyeglasses and journals of ear, nose and throat medicine. But he had always overlooked the cardboard box containing the heads.
Dr. Houston Bell of Roanoke, a retired ear, nose and throat surgeon, used to teach at Gill Memorial. "We had heads," he recalled Thursday, "that we had obtained from prisoners, I think. I'm not sure . . . "
"We used them, as did many medical schools, for teaching purposes - head and neck surgery."
He never knew any of the heads had been moved from the clinic, though, he said.
Dr. William Massello of the state medical examiner's office in Roanoke said the heads hadn't belonged to prisoners. It's "an old wives' tale" that teaching hospitals use prisoners' bodies, he said. Rather, papers and markings found with the heads showed they were from bodies that had been donated to science.
Before hearing Fisher's story, all Massello had been able to determine about the heads' origin was that they had been obtained from the state "many years ago."
The maintenance man who found the heads said two of them didn't have ears. But Massello said an examination showed the ears still were there. "Heads that are this old . . . get a lot of anatomy distorted," he explained.
And what had appeared to be an earring on one of the heads actually was a piece of plastic or wire, he said.
The heads, which probably are no longer useful for teaching, will be stored at the medical examiner's office until they are picked up by a courier from the state, Massello said.
by CNB