For quite a while now, I’ve been collecting the urban legends that emanate from students and employees at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Now that I live next door, I’m looking for some new ones. Urban legends are similar to myths. They tell a story that’s usually related to something historical or factual but doesn’t have to be, and the story reflects some sort of moral value, as interpreted by the culture the story comes from. They are cautionary tales that are disguised to not look like cautionary tales.
Being told in Mississippi by Mississippians, there’s some effort to make the stories more vivid, more interesting, and more local than, say, stories from the University of Pennsylvania Medical College, no offense to Pennsylvanians. Stories generated in Mississippi will have our unique flavor and perspective on things like race, sexuality, gender, religion, and people from Mississippi State University.
I’ve been doing this for around forty years, and there are a lot of stories. These are the categories I’ve organized them with.
Stories about Cadavers: Like the Greeks, UMMC students are obsessed with the moral implications of death, the relations between the dead and the living, and the influence of living morality on the dead body. Stories about cadavers often have the elements of ghost stories but are couched in a medical scenario to give them extra vitality and credence.
Stories about Swelling and Exploding Cysts: What goes into the body must come out of the body, and what more interesting way to come out of the body is there than exploding cysts? Often, these stories involve elements of new ties/shirts/suits that are destroyed by detritus shooting out of a cyst. These are often tales of how dedicated a young doctor might be who sacrifice his new tie or designer glasses to open the cyst, often on some fat woman’s taint.
Stories about Catheters: The Greeks did this, too. Stories about the phallus and its misadventures are both the stuff of comedy and morality. A malfunctioning phallus and what must be done to make it function can encompass all sorts of memes about morality, culture, and body horror.
Stories about Aids: Although they’re not as prominent now, there was once an entire genre of stories about Aids. To the myth-maker, aids was not only a disease but a moral judgment against the people who violate the cultural mores about sexuality and gratuitous sexual encounters. Stories about men, often upstanding citizens, who got aids by cheating on their spouses were common.
Stories about Strippers and Prostitutes: Much like the aids stories, these are stories about sexual morality and the perils of wanton sexuality. Strippers and prostitutes make a lot of money, but they end up at the hospital with fatal diseases or gunshot or knife wounds that prove fatal. These stories are precautions both against using prostitutes and becoming one.
Dumb Mistakes/Darwin Awards: There may be no greater cautionary tale than “Don’t do dumb things.” Especially in the South, stories about “y’all watch this” or “y’all hold my beer.” are perfect for urban myths, and their arrival at the hospital with fingers/testicles/teeth/ears/toes blown off make great stories.
Crime Doesn’t Pay: Stories about criminals who show up at the hospital after the police or other criminals shoot them are pretty common. While there’s sometimes a racial element to these stories, they all have moral implications. If you hadn’t have been doing that, you wouldn’t have ended up here with a gunshot wound.
Because University is a communal experience, they are great places to generate stories, particularly myth-building stories. Most of the stories I’ve collected about UMMC I can’t reprint here because they’re either really gross, really depressing, and sometimes obviously bigoted. There are guys who spend their entire lives and careers studying the memes broadcast in stories like these. It’s a fascinating area of study.
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