TeeJF
Well-known member
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2011
- Messages
- 2,882
- Reaction score
- 3,095
A BIG BIG thank you for the help on this one - you know who you are! 
In a small town in southern Germany there is a long street situated near the centre of the town. Along most of the length of the street there are private clinics making it a veritable Harley Strasse! One of the clinics lies derelict now but it was originally the combined home and practise of a urology specialist.
Born befoire the Great War, it appears the Herr Doktor practised with his wife and/or another partner. He died in the late 1980s but the house was clearly still occupied for some time afterwards - whether or not it still functioned as a clinic after his demise is unclear - until his wife eventually passed away. The house lies derelict now and it is very much a time capsule with masses of interesting artefacts scattered about everywhere you look. The fact of there being so much stuff left behind would tend to indicate that in all likelihood the doctor and his wife had no children, or that possibly they were pre-deceased, but it has proved singularly difficult to find out anything much at all about this enigmatic location.
The building oozes an atmosphere of the macabre, not least on the ground floor where there are two consulting/operating rooms complete with their array of medical equipment still in place - drugs, surgical equipment, couches with leg stirrups, and even the operating lights. In an anteroom off one of the consulting rooms there is a large trolley upon which there are eight human kidneys pickled in formaldehyde in square glass cases!
It appears the doctor had a strange taste in art for there are several prints of females in pretty pastel summer dresses dotted around the house, not in itself anything particularly unusual until closer inspection reveals that the women wearing the dresses are skeletal and very much in the style of the renowned German artist H. R. Geiger, he of 'Alien' and 'Necronomicon' fame...
Very odd indeed!
Also on the ground floor there is a room which must have been really lovely in it's time, for it looks out across a large private garden and has heavily stacked book shelves along much of the walls - clearly it was a study or a library. A quick look at some of the titles was interesting in itself, one possibly pointing to Nazi sympathies for it was a title on Albert Speer, Hitler's architect. Given that the doctor was at his prime during the Nazi era this is perhaps not particularly surprising.
The bright and airy first floor is reached by a grand curving staircase and constitutes the living area of the house with a lounge plenty big enough for a full size Steinway grand. But here again there is a hint of the macabre for a large, moth eaten, stuffed fox sits atop the mouldering remains of the once mighty piano. Someone in the household was very much into hunting for there are a number of animal skins and the horns of small deer or mountain goats left lying about. We also found several black and white photographs, presumably of the doctor and his wife, which look like they were taken on holidays in the early 1950s. A well equipped kitchen opens off the first floor hall but bizarrely there is also what appears to be a small ward to the rear of the kitchen hinting at in-patient treatment on a limited scale. Towards the front of the house we found a room containing several wardrobes with clean and immaculately pressed lady's clothing left hanging there, some of it still in plastic wrap as though it has just come back from the dry cleaners.
The top floor is the bedroom area where there are also a number of rooms which looked very much like they were used as office space, but there is so much stuff heaped up that it's hard to be sure of anything in this house!
Two days after our visit to the clinic a small set of photographs appeared in the Farcebok DerP site and it was immediately clear from the position of one or two objects that the author of the photos had gone in after us because the items were still in the positions we had turned them to for our pictures!
Die Fotografien...
In the library at the back of the house...
In the first of the two consulting/operation rooms...
A large glass fronted cabinet set in the wall still contains surgical instruments...
A formidable array of surgical impedimenta!
Before the advent of disposable plastic syringes they were made of glass so that they could be re-used...
This lamp illuminated the work bench in the theatre.
The label on the box points at this being part of an endoscope?
It's unclear whether this is some sort of timer or a gas pressure gauge though there is a supply hose or the like entering the unit at the bottom.
Spread 'em
It appears the patient's records were typed up in the consulting room/theatre.
It's gruesome time
And here we have a selection of the spares available for your model sir...
I assume these were used for the purpose of teaching
An array of potions and lotions and chemicals sit in a room behind the theatre/consulting room.
Test tube racks and possibly an autoclave for sterilising equipment.
The second consultingroom.
More medicines.
I'm not sure I'd want these waved around my renal anatomy
A renal anatomical chart.
This is very strange! It looks like a sectioned and halved kidney but it is massive, at least twice the size of a large human kidney
So the question is, is it actually a brain
It does look a bit like one. But if it's a brain what is it doing in a urology clinic 
Up to the first floor and the house's living areas now.
How sad to see a Steinway in this state...
...and for that matter to see a magnificent creature like this reduced to a trophy...
Huge dressers like this are very common in German homes.
Left hanging after her last walk into town.
Monochrome holiday snaps.
One must assume that this is the doctor and his wife and it looks to me like it will have been the early 1950s from the age of the subjects and their clothing styles.
Resting after the hunt perhaps?
An obsession with the macabre...
An array of clean clothing in a wardrobe.
Make of this what you will... it spoke volumes to us
A little odd to say the least but strangely compelling for all that
Urology journals and reference works on the top floor.
That's your lot for now, hope you enjoyed the pix. 
