If he wasn’t already chair of Penn State College of Medicine’s Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, Dr. Berend Mets could work as a tour guide in the museum he’s building.
On a recent walk through his department’s growing collection of medical gadgets from throughout history, Mets talked about anesthesiology the way some people talk about exploring space.
Anesthesiology is not what you think. Doctors don’t inject you with the medical equivalent of Sleepy Time Tea, and you don’t take a nap. Instead, they deliver chemicals that activate your body’s off switch. Machines pump your heart and fill your lungs with air, while you teeter in a twilight state between this world and the next. Pain – or the memory of it, anyway – doesn’t exist there. Then the anesthesiologist brings you back, unscathed.
Anesthetists like Mets rarely make headlines, but they cast big shadows. They have been center stage throughout COVID-19. The ventilators you’ve heard so much about are their equipment. And without them, surgery and much of medical science would be unthinkable.
“You hold people’s lives in your hands,” Mets said.
Glass cabinets in the wood-walled Julien F. Biebuyck library, a lecture and meeting room at the College of Medicine where Anesthesiology presents important talks, will show tools and accoutrements from more than 100 years of medical innovation. The idea is a tactile museum; students will hold and handle the same equipment as their counterparts from history.
The College of Medicine will inaugurate the new facility — named the Dr. Berend Mets Museum of Anaesthesia — at an event memorializing the 50th anniversary of Mets’ department in October.
View a gallery of images from the museum
Mets paused on his tour to talk about some of the pieces already on display, the straps of a surgical mask crossing through his salt and pepper hair. Excitement punctuates his voice, which is touched with an accent from South Africa.
That’s where in 1982, Mets fell in love. As an intern at Edendale Hospital in the province of Natal, Mets anesthetized a patient receiving an orthopedic procedure. In his book, “Waking Up Safer? An Anesthesiologist’s Record,” Mets recalls his palms sweating as he tracked the ebb of the man’s pulse and then brought him back to life.
“I was hooked,” he wrote.
Four decades later, Mets’ job is hooking future health care workers into the specialty. He’s an authority on the profession’s history and now a tracker of its artifacts.
Anesthesia began at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1846, when an untrained dentist used ether to provide pain free surgery. Since then the chemicals have changed little, but an entire industry formed around making them safer. They’ve discovered how to keep volatile, deadly substances like ether from exploding. And better yet, they’ve invented elaborate equipment to keep them from killing the patients they’re supposed to help.