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Ceridwen

Ceridwen

You kids get off my lawn. 

Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary with CD-ROM (Dorland's Medical Dictionary) - William Alexander Newman Dorland I'm going to assume this was the medical dictionary at my grandfather's house when I was a kid. Boy howdy, did my cousins and I get up to the usual hijacks with this one. Grandpa would almost always catch us, because we were the opposite of slick. You guys are looking up the naughty pictures, he'd say, as we sat looking in slack-jawed horror at an extreme case of gonorrhea. Then we'd flip quickly to athlete's foot and blink our blue eyes at him. Who, us?

Grandpa was a doctor, a general practitioner in outstate Minnesota. He delivered at least a thousand babies, maybe two. Late in his life, when he was suffering from senior dementia, I would be with him in restaurants and shops, and women would approach him. You delivered my children, they would say. Thank you. And then a thousand life details of men and women older than I. He couldn't remember them, but he was funny and charming, the way he was.

Google image search has almost completely replaced these remarkable tomes for looking up terrifying pictures of diseased organs. Alas.