Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (27 page)

“That,” explained my friend, “is why all cadavers given to med students have bags put over their heads.”

Every medical school has stories like these two which were sent to me, respectively, from the Midwest and from New England. In variations of the legend, the body is said to be that of the student’s mother, father, uncle, or some other relative with whom the student had suffered a falling-out and had failed to keep in touch. The bag-over-the-head strategy would seem to make it very difficult for future brain surgeons and ear, nose, and throat specialists to learn anatomy. In 1982, an actual instance of the cadaver of a student’s relative—a great-aunt—showing up in a gross anatomy laboratory of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, School of Medicine was reported in a letter to the
Journal of the American Medical Association,
vol. 247, no. 15, p. 2096. Although it was not the same cadaver that the student was working on, according to the letter, “further trauma to the student was obviated by the immediate substitution of another cadaver by the state anatomical board.” “The Relative’s Cadaver” legend became attached to the eighteenth-century English novelist Laurence Sterne. Shortly after Sterne’s death in 1768, a story began to circulate saying that Sterne’s body had been stolen by grave robbers and sold to Cambridge University’s medical school, where it was recognized by one of his friends. Early biographers of Sterne included and embellished the story, but more recent scholars failed to find any evidence for the incident and have rejected it as folklore.

“Gerbilling”

A
colleague at work related a gruesome tale about homosexuals. It seems that certain elements in the gay community have taken to deriving sexual stimulation from the insertion of a live rodent into their anus. (This is not a joke!) Gerbils appear to be the animal of choice. The stimulation evidently arises from the motion of the animal after insertion, and therein lies the problem: Some devotees of this practice have been badly injured when the gerbil became overly frisky and began clawing at the person’s insides. My colleague claimed to have reliable information about this because he had a friend who was a doctor. His friend, while working in the emergency room, had actually seen X rays of the insides of a homosexual who had been injured by practicing this ritual.

When I told my colleague that this story sounded extremely hokey and implausible, he became adamant in vowing for the story’s authenticity. When I pressed him for the name of his doctor friend, he backed off somewhat, saying that he thought he remembered that it was not actually his friend who saw the X rays, but his friend’s brother (also a doctor). It was not clear whether the doctor who saw the X rays was the same one who supposedly treated the patient.

A
friend of mine knows a nurse at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.

She told him that [insert name of a handsome male actor here] visited the emergency room the other night. The actor confessed that he had been engaged in a kinky gay sexual game that involves sticking a live gerbil up your rectum. Only this time, the gerbil got stuck. The nurse actually saw the X ray. It’s absolutely true.

…There was one problem. The story wasn’t true.

The generic version of the story is from a 1987 letter from a reader in Illinois. The Hollywood version is from Stephen Randall’s “Media” column in
Playboy,
December 1990. References to gerbilling, also known as “filching,” “felching,” and “tunneling,” have circulated since the late 1960s, and the malicious homophobic legend suddenly erupted in 1984 and has been rampant ever since. The lives and careers of several male media personalities—news anchors, weathercasters, and film stars—have been plagued and sometimes even ruined by the attachment of gerbilling stories and rumors to their names. Usually the stories claim that a FOAF has seen actual X rays of sufferers, as is the case in Dr. Richard T. Caleel’s 1986 book
Surgeon! A Year in the Life of an Inner City Doctor,
but here, as in the oral tradition, the supposed source is a friend of a friend working in a different hospital. For a definitive discussion of the extensive folklore of gerbilling see Norine Dresser’s “The Case of the Missing Gerbil” in
Western Folklore,
vol. 58 (July 1994), pp. 229–42. Dresser concludes, “There is nothing or no one to verify the practice of gerbilling. A computer search of all the medical/scientific literature reports zero entries testifying to that act. Furthermore, it has been impossible to find a first-hand witness or a self-professed practitioner.” One published source seemingly disagrees with this widely held view—the 1989 book
News of the Weird,
compiled by Chuck Shepherd, John J. Kohut, and Roland Sweet, which claimed that “Medical researchers, tabulating cases in which items were recovered from the rectums of patients, reported…a live, shaved, declawed gerbil….” However, the source cited, a 1986 article on “rectal foreign bodies” published in the medical journal
Surgery,
contained no references to gerbils or other small animals. Confronted with this anomaly by Cecil Adams, author of the popular “Straight Dope” column, Shepherd explained that he had “made a transcribing error.” An account of gerbilling combined with a colonic explosion circulated on the Internet in 1996 and ’97, attributing the incident to “the Severe Burns Unit of Salt Lake City Hospital.” There is no such-named hospital in Salt Lake City, and, believe me, if any such thing had happened in
any
local hospital, I would have heard about it.

“Scrotum Self-Repair”

A
man comes into the hospital emergency room and asks to see a doctor. When the attending physician comes into the examining room the man removes his pants, and the doctor sees that the man’s scrotum is wrapped in yards of soiled linen and has swollen to huge size. The man won’t tell the doctor what happened to him, so the doctor takes X rays. He finds that there are staples in the man’s scrotum. When confronted with this information the man finally tells his story.

He is a wood-worker, and since one day he had a little spare time on his hands, he decided to use his stationary belt sander as a means of sexual gratification. He had done this many times before without any undue incident. This time, however, he slipped and fell onto the belt sander as it was running at full speed. The man was thrown eight or nine feet forward into the wall. When he picked himself up he discovered that he had torn open his scrotum. In spite of the awful pain, the man just couldn’t face a doctor with such a story, so he stapled his scrotum together. Unfortunately, the staples were neither sterile nor proof against rust, so his scrotum became horribly infected, forcing him to eventually go to the doctor after all. Well, the doctor cleaned the wound and fixed the poor guy up the best he could, but then he had to break the horrible news: when the accident had happened the man’s testicles had been ripped free from his scrotum and had been lost. With all the blood and pain the man had never noticed, and now it was too late to go looking for them. He had been castrated by a belt sander.

From Hans P. Broedel’s note “On the Dangers of Close Proximity to Power Tools,” in
Northwest Folklore,
vol. 10 (fall 1991), pp. 47–48. The teller of this story said that he had heard it “on good authority from a friend who works in the emergency room of a large local hospital.” Broedel, a graduate student in history at the University of Washington at the time, wrote that “this story looks very much like an urban legend,” and confirmed his hunch by noting that “recently an acquaintance told me that he had seen the same story floating around in a local computer net.” In another report of the same story told orally, the scrotum is said to have swollen to the size of a basketball after being repaired with drywall staples. The doctor put the patient under full anesthesia for treatment, and the patient explained how he was injured after regaining consciousness. Incredibly enough, this horrific story actually derives from an incident reported in a medical journal; copies of the single-page article, often showing signs of being repeatedly photocopied, have circulated since shortly after it appeared. In the July 1991 issue of
Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality,
p. 15, William A. Morton, Jr., M.D., reported this instance of “Scrotum Self-Repair.” He told essentially the same story, although with full clinical and anatomical detail couched in precise medical terminology. However, details were changed somewhat in person-to-person transmission. For example, the actual victim worked in a machine shop and was involved with “the canvas drive-belt of a large floor-based piece of running machinery.” His injury was wrapped in “two or three yards of foul-smelling stained gauze wrapper” and his scrotum was swollen to “twice the size of a grapefruit.” In the accident the man was thrown “a few feet,” and he lost only his left testis. Is this journal article, perhaps, a hoax? David Herzog, then a writer for the
Allentown (Pennsylvania) Morning Call,
spoke to Dr. Morton in 1992 and was told that the case happened 20 years ago.

“Superglue Revenge”

I
heard this story from a woman I worked with who used to work at the court house in Wheaton, Illinois; she heard it from the girl in “records” who claimed to have read it as a legal action complaint.

The story goes that a woman married to a cheating husband was so sick and tired of it that she decided to get even. So one night when he was sleeping she stripped off his underwear and Superglued his area of anatomy with which he was cheating to his tummy. Supposedly he had to have surgery to undo this deed, and he sued the wife for malicious assault and won. Have you heard this?

N
urses in a provincial [English] hospital recently took charge of a man who had been bizarrely punished by his wife for infidelity. She had returned unexpectedly to the family home, and could hear him misbehaving. He was engaged in sexual congress that was both noisy and enthusiastic, characteristics which had been missing for some time from his dealings with his wife. She herself made no noise, let herself out of the flat, and returned at her usual time. She cooked a fine dinner, taking care to grind up some sleeping-pills and include them in the mashed potatoes. Her husband retired early to bed, pleading tiredness, and a little later on she stripped him as he slept, and stuck his hand to his penis with Super Glue.

The doctors and nurses faced the problem of separating manual and genital flesh from their tangle, and they had moreover to improvise an arrangement to enable the patient to urinate; plastic surgery was eventually required to restore the appearance of the parts.

The decorously worded query (“area of anatomy” indeed!) came in 1988 from a reader in Illinois whose signature was illegible. In other versions of the story the aggrieved wife glues his penis to his abdomen, or sometimes substitutes Superglue for the husband’s lubricating jelly. The second version quoted is from a story titled “Structural Anthropology” by Adam Mars-Jones, in
The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
(1987). The rest of the short story consists of Mars-Jones’s mock dissection of the legend using “the techniques of structural anthropology pioneered by Lévi-Strauss.” The numerous reports of “Superglue Revenge” in my files are often credited to people who claim to know personally one of the principals involved. Invariably, upon checking back with their sources, my informants failed to validate the incident. A correspondent from Texas actually asked the ex-wife of the promiscuous husband point-blank if she had done the deed attributed to her in local gossip. She replied, “There was absolutely nothing to that story, and I don’t have any idea how it got started. If I had thought of it, I would have done it!”

“The Runaway Patient”

M
y next-door neighbor, he’s a physician,” Morgan said. “He told me that at the VA hospital he worked in there was a man in bed on the sixth floor who’d had a stroke and was completely paralyzed and couldn’t speak. This man was getting therapy down in the basement. They made an appointment for him one day to have some therapy at a certain hour and the people on the sixth floor put him in the elevator and he went down to the basement. But there’d been a screw-up. They weren’t aware down there that he was coming. No one was there to take him off the elevator. So he was on this elevator and he couldn’t speak and people on the sixth floor assumed he was being kept in therapy. And he rode up and down the elevator for three days.”