57. Feline Tales

Judith's cousin Hugh and his wife Bernadette in Manchester have two cats: Myfanwy and Mimi. Recently Myfanwy disappeared for some days, causing her owners some anxiety. The police were notified, and neighbours were alerted. It turns out that she had just stayed for some time in a nearby garden. I had wondered whether, despite having been neutered, she was still in heat, seeking males. But when I researched the subject it became apparent that this was very unlikely. She was just disloyal.
Or maybe she was nursing an injury.

These exciting events reminded me of my own feline experiences.
Towards the end of my secondary education we had a new biology master. He suggested that we should watch the dissection of a cat. So a few of us set out to catch a cat. Large numbers of feral cats did swarm in the yards and around the dustbins in Jerusalem, where we lived, but it was quite impossible to catch them. Hardly anybody kept domesticated cats.

Then one day I found a dead cat lying in the road. I put it in a sack and took it to school. The biology master was delighted and arranged its dissection and
anatomical demonstration without delay, before the carcass would decompose.
We watched fascinated - and I haven't forgotten it. My interest in biology certainly influenced my later trend toward medicine.

None of our family ever kept animals - except a tortoise, who died the first winter. Dogs do show genuine recognition, loyalty and affection - but not sufficient to induce us to acquire one. And I definitely do not like cats. They are only friendly toward people who feed them - they remind me of the classical description of prostitutes.

My next feline contact was in medical school, where the pharmacology course
included a series of practical experiments using cats. Groups of students were each allocated a living cat in a sack - ferals that had been caught somehow. The lab technician injected each cat through the sac with a barbiturate solution - aiming for the abdominal cavity. After an interval, the sleeping animal could be safely removed from the sac and fixed by its limbs to the work bench. More anaesthetic could be injected as required.

An artery in the groin was tied to the end of a glass cannula and connected to a
manometer filled with a solution of heparin to prevent clotting. The cat's blood pressure was recorded through a stylus onto a 'kymograph' - a slowly revolving
cylinder of smooth paper blackened with soot. At the conclusion of the experiment, the paper was carefully detached from the cylinder, drawn through a fixing solution of varnish and left to dry. The cat was killed - they called it 'sacrifice'.
The members of each of our groups shared sections of the kymograph paper record and we wrote our individual reports of the experiment.

On one occasion there was an unfortunate 'cat-astrophy': the wife of the medical school dean had lost her domesticated pet cat and she suspected foul play. At the time, we were the only course that used cats. During the following experiment she stormed into the laboratory - and actually identified her cat on one of the tables. It was too damaged and could not be rescued. She was furious and there were embarrassing repercussion - out of our earshot.

So when we visit Hugh and Bernadette, we maintain our indifference towards the feigned affection of their cats. If the cats persist, I just whisper: 'remember pharmacology'... and they soon give up.
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