Home for fascination

W.Va. physician has museum for medical artifacts

Associated Press

HUNTINGTON, W.Va.

Dr. Omayma Touma was the driving force behind her husband’s medical history museum.

“My wife got fed up with all of this,” explained Dr. Joseph Touma, laughing. “She said, ‘Joe, you have to do something with it.’ My daughter, Mona, said I should open a little museum.”

That was in the mid-1990s.

The ear, nose and throat specialist had been collecting medical artifacts for years, and they were piling up.

At the same time, he was renovating a building at 314 Ninth St. in downtown Huntington and the 3,500-square-foot third floor was the perfect place to house the growing collection.

A practicing physician for 40 years, Touma’s fascination with medical artifacts started with one simple ear trumpet he purchased nearly 30 years ago.

“I’m fascinated by the progress of medicine ... as far as deafness and hearing,” he said, pulling out an assortment of the old-fashioned hearing aids from an antique display case. He has one of the largest collections of ear trumpets in the world, with hundreds of examples.

The earliest ones are made from seashells. He has one made from ivory (“This was a rich lady’s ear trumpet”), a black one for funerals, one with a long tube that was used during meetings so the listener could move the trumpet to focus on different speakers.

Touma exhibits childlike joy when he shows one trumpet with eyeglasses attached.

“See, you can use it to hear, and then if you couldn’t see, well, you use the glasses.” Another one in the collection is made into a cane.

“If you’re getting old and you need a cane, and you also have hearing loss ...,” Touma said, demonstrating both aspects of the instrument.

“I graduated from one ear trumpet to all of these,” he said, scanning the extensive array. “Then I went for the ENT stuff. As I was doing more ear, nose and throat work, I got into the history of medicine.”

That led to the purchase of an entire 19th-century apothecary — Lee’s Pharmacy, in Pittsburgh — and 1,000 books, some from the 15th century, through the early 20th century, just a few of the thousands of items in the exhibit.

The gleaming, restored hardwood floors of the museum complement the different displays, divided into medical practice areas.

“I started buying little things,” Touma said, “at an auction in New York. I literally ended up buying a whole truckload at a reasonable price.”

It took about a year to catalog all of the pieces, and he hired Marshall University students to do the work.

“One advantage of this museum instead of, say, a large, freestanding museum, like the International College of Surgeons, in Chicago, is that we don’t have all of the statues of physicians and things like that — we’re just down to earth and we focus on what the doctors and patients used,” Touma said.

The Marshall School of Medicine uses the museum to give incoming medical students a view of the past that few can experience.

At this time, the museum is open by appointment only.

A perfectionist, Touma moves shipping boxes off the top of a display for a visitor. The neatly dressed physician darts from one area to another, pausing long enough to share stories of different pieces of equipment.

“Here’s the ‘quackery equipment’ case. When electricity came, they used to electrocute people over an achy joint and say it helped,” he said with a smile.

There is a case full of microscopes, dozens of them, from the early 19th century through the 1930s. Touma knows details about each one and can discuss its features and faults.

One case holds feeders for the invalid, china bowls with spouts, used to serve broth and liquids before the invention of intravenous therapy. A collection of spoons with lids was used to give doses of medicines.

“Medicine used to smell terrible, so they put the medicine in here,” Touma said, pointing to the bowl of the spoon, “and then they closed this cover so you didn’t have to smell it.”

In the ophthalmology section, he points to a collection of antique eyewear he purchased as a lot from an upscale auction house. The glasses, some in cases, many never used, were from a shop in France that had been closed and never cleaned out for many years.

Two amputation sets from the Civil War era sit in velvet-lined wooden boxes and include handsaws and knives. A display of anesthesiology machines fascinates and appalls the modern-day doctor.

“See, they just put the ether right in here,” he said, pointing to the mask, “and there was no monitoring, no filtering. Amazing.”

Likewise, hand drills for craniotomy send Touma into tales of frequent deaths during past surgeries.

The museum holds a doctor’s coupe, an original 1926 Model T that was fully restored by a collector in Milton.

“We brought it in through there,” he said, pointing to the large window in the corner of the second-story museum. A crane lifted the car, in parts, to its current location.

A horse buggy by Studebaker and saddlebags full of vials of medicine for a doctor’s horse are other examples of transportation in the Touma collection.

Perhaps the most disturbing tool was used to remove tonsils. Touma demonstrated how a forklike apparatus was inserted into the tonsils, and then a metal loop cut the offending appendage with a scissors action.

“The fork held it in place, as people used to swallow them when they were cut off,” Touma said.

Touma is collecting more items from West Virginia, and he’s acquired an entire examining room from a circa-1920 doctor’s office in Chelyan.

In the dental display, a drill from 1890 is powered by a foot pedal. Others from the 1930s and 1940s are electrically propelled, but look barbaric nonetheless.

Touma has an entire 1920s-era ENT room, complete with chair, cautery (an instrument for cauterizing) and other furniture from a doctor in New York City. In a bookcase in the display, he has several oversize books including one produced in Venice by Galeni, an ancient Greek physician and surgeon. It’s dated MDXXV, or A.D. 1525. Another book, written in Arabic, restored and kept in a special box, is from A.D. 1350.

“It’s on silk paper, all handwritten,” he said, carefully leafing through the pages. “There are these amazing charts of diseases: causes, symptoms, management and treatment.” He notes that current physicians use a very similar approach to disease. “This book -- that’s the only one.”

Cases of china bedpans and urinals make the doctor laugh as he shows one with a poem written in it, another with a beautiful floral pattern.

He developed a display of otoscopes that he’s taken to meetings to share with other physicians in his field.

Touma talked about the progress that came when physicians would have a problem with the current equipment and then would come up with a better tool. He’s invented 16 different pieces of medical equipment that are used extensively today, including a tube that allows ventilation in the middle ear, often used to help with ear infections in children.

A native of Syria, Touma went to Damascus University for medical school and performed residencies at the University of Tennessee-Memphis and at Wayne State University, in Detroit. His wife is a retired pediatrician who ran the Cabell County Health Department for several years. His son, Joseph, is in practice with him, and his daughter, Mona, is a lawyer who just left Goldman Sachs to move with her husband and young daughter to Washington, D.C. His son and daughter-in-law have three sons and a daughter.

The Toumas adopted Huntington when they got out of their medical residencies.

“There was a great medical facility, and a beautiful museum,” Touma said, referring to the Huntington Museum of Art, where he’s been active as a board member and as a donor. “Before I knew it, I found a church, Holy Spirit Antiochian Orthodox Church. It was meant to be.”