SKULLS AND SKELETONS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20127, 21 April 1928, Page 14 (Supplement)

SKULLS AND SKELETONS

WOMAN TAKES UP CLEANING WORK.

LONDON, Mai eh 6. One of the strangest posts hold by a woman is that of Mrs Elizabeth Pratt, of the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.

Her work is the cleaning of 10,000 odd skulls and skeletons in the College. Just now she is giving “her collection,” as she calls it, a special dusting in h >hour of John Huh ter, the famous surgeon, whose bicentenary is being celebrated at the College. She was going from case to case of the collection when a press representative found her. With a little hai brush she dusted each of the crevices in the cranium of the teeth, and finally polished the skull with a duster. “Does it upset me! Bless you, no.” she exclaimed. “I have done this for 12 years now and I have grown quite fond of some of them. I could not like them-mpre if they were cab nets of Crown Derby. I did get a bit of a turn on© day soon after I started here. I was dusting a skeleton’s feet and its hand got caught in my hair. It felt just as though t’m thing was trying to stop me. I pulled myself together though, and called an attendant to disentangle the bones.

“People ask mo if I don’t get nightmares from working here, hut I have never even dreamt of them.”