One ghostly white corpse has a fully developed body and face, but no skull or brain. Another container is stuffed with four palm-sized fetuses.
Next to those, soaking in ochre-colored chemicals, is another unborn baby with peeling skin.
This nightmarish display isn’t the set of a horror movie or the lair of a mad scientist. It is the life’s work of Dr Atiya Mohamed Saeed, head of Erbil’s Howar Hospital, who for 35 years has collected more than 120 unborn fetuses and other medical anomalies to be used for research.
The grisly menagerie is also meant as a memento: Many of Saeed’s specimens came from the murderous Anfal Campaigns of the late 1980s, when Saddam Hussein unleashed chemical weapons on Kurdish areas.
Saeed said women who were pregnant during the attacks, which included mustard gas, suffered stillbirths and fetus abnormalities. She doesn’t want the new generation to forget the atrocities and wants to someday put her collection in a museum.
“Ordinary people are frightened by abnormal fetuses with no brain, an enlarged head or holes in the body,” said Saeed, a UK-trained pediatrician and gynecologist who is also known as Dr Lapzerin, or “Dr. Golden Hand.”
She said some people don’t believe the effects of chemical weapons on the human body. The display serves as hard-hitting testimony to its devastating impact.
“Seeing is believing,” Saeed told Rudaw.
The grim-looking samples are found on the third floor of Howar Hospital. Some are preserved in large mason jars, while others are in flimsy containers covered with plastic wrap. Most are marked with a name and origin written on pieces of peeling duct tape.
All the specimens are beloved by Saeed.
“I could never forget this one,” she said, eyes gleaming as she lifted the sample for inspection. She held it up at arm’s length in admiration before pressing it to her face for analysis.
“Thirteen fibroids in one uterus,” she said, counting each one. “It’s wonderful!”
“Not everybody does this. Only the mad ones do this.”
If Saeed’s obsession seems odd to some, her staff has no problem working with and around the preserved fetuses, though they could probably do without the smell of formaldehyde.
“This is normal for me,” said Azeezah Hamad Rasool, a Hower medical assistant. “I have seen thousands of samples that are now gone. It’s important to preserve these samples for study.”
Saeed began collecting them in 1980 after she completed her studies in London and returning to the Kurdistan region. She said many of the specimens have dried up or spoiled, but at least 120 good ones remain.
The doctor points out that not every fetus died as a result of chemical weapons. She said many died because of a physician’s malpractice, another problem she wants her future museum to highlight.
The doctor seeks permission from mothers before preserving their fetuses. Many refuse, she said, often for religious or personal reasons.
For the many critics who condemn her collection, Saeed has a simple response.
“I don’t throw the products of human beings into the dust bin,” she said. “Most will. But it’s a matter of principle for me.”
Until she has the time and money for her museum, Saeed is looking for financial support to keep the specimens in proper jars for preservation.
“Let foreign experts come and do research,” she said. “We need it. I will help them.”
In the end, Saeed is unfazed by what others think of her collection of fetuses and odd medical remains.
“I am just trying to be a good doctor.”
