"Oddities"

This week, while watching the documentary film on the Muller Museum, I thought of the show “Oddities,” a cable program which airs on the Discovery Channel. “Oddities” is a sort of documentary/reality television program which features the day-to-day business of an antique shop. They boast at being involved in “weird world of strange and extraordinary science artifacts.” Odd items bought and sold by the shop and featured on the show have included a mummified cat, shrunken heads, art made from nail clippings, a book bound with human flesh, a straitjacket, and a human heart with a bullet plunged inside. “Oddities” has also featured a vast variety of different medical instruments.

This show demonstrates the interweaving worlds of entertainment, consumerism, and scientific medicine. We are not only viewing a show about the “oddities” which often features body parts and medical instruments, but one that features people--often depicted as odd themselves--purchasing these items for their own personal entertainment and collection. We are able to not only satisfy our visual senses and our need for entertainment, but are able to observe deviancy, the “odd,” and the history of medicine.

Angela