The Cardboard Box: Anatomy of a Joke

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Title: The Cardboard Box: Anatomy of a Joke
Author: gardnerhill               
Word Count: 60
Rating: G
Warning: None
Summary: Judging by one of my former-nurse mother’s stories, medical students haven’t changed at all.
                                                                                       
***

“I can understand Miss Cushing’s original belief that it was a disgusting prank, Holmes. Medical students do tend to become calloused about dealing with human body parts.”

Holmes looked at me and cocked one eyebrow.

I smiled, in an ungentlemanly manner. “Some night I may tell you about the mystery of the pensioner’s corpse, the Anatomy professor, and the absinthe.”

Comments

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

This former nurse agrees. The only thing worse than doctors is would-be doctors.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

In Dickens' PICKWICK PAPERS (1830) two of the funniest characters are Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen, the medical students who cheerily discuss the dissection of a child's corpse while they're eating a barrel of oysters - and who later circle two fist-fighters with their bowls and flensers, ready to bleed the first one who falls.

[debriswoman]

Yep...sounds entirely likely
And...do tell, Watson.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

I'll only say that my mother's story involved a cadaver, a meathook, and Halloween night, and led to two expulsions.

[debriswoman]

The world may not yet be ready for the rest of the tale...

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

Ignore debriswoman! Please don't tell, Watson ^^"

I wonder if Holmes eventually left his body to science. Seems like the sort of thing he wouldn't be bothered about.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

I can see a flock of Royal Medical College men gathered around the door in Sussex, pickling jars in hand, waiting for that brain, and Watson furiously shooing them away like vultures every morning.

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

Hopes for further details - ignore Frankles, she'll just have to put her hands over her ears.

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

Between creepy!Holmes hoping to cut them off for his collection and ungentlemanly!Watson telling disturbing anecdotes, that seems like excellent advice ^^"

(And I can't believe it took you this long to find a ferret icon.)

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

What's rather more worrying is the discussion the Ferret and the Ocelot are having as to the possibility of contributions to MMI.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

The details would be a tad upsetting in a family publication like the STRAND, especially not when read over the breakfast table.

[castiron.livejournal.com]

Hee! A greater mystery than the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant!

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Half the fun of Canon is piecing together the unwritten cases from the teasing hints left by Watson.

[sanguinity]

Watson is such a tease with his stories! He may accuse Holmes of having an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic, but he and Watson are very much a matched pair in that respect.

(omg, medical students! I was just listening to the Merrison version again, and the unholy glee with which the students responded to Lestrade's story...! They do have a reputation, don't they?)

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, the students are hilarious. I love the "You'll find all their heads upstairs, Inspector!" to roars of laughter.

Medical people, like police, deal with so much of the foul and gruesome side of life that both professions are infamous for their gallows humor. So you get EMTs roaring in laughter at the idiot who tried to stop freeway traffic near his stopped car by lying down across the road - and subsequently had to be taken to the morgue in several bags (a friend's story).