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I saw the world’s creepiest museum

As a late birthday present, I took my son Matthew and his friend Jacob today to the Mutter Museum in downtown Philadelphia. The Mutter (the “u” has an umlaut; you say it, “Myoo-ter”) displays medical anomalies and artifacts from the collection of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It is a very serious museum, but […]

As a late birthday present, I took my son Matthew and his friend Jacob today to the Mutter Museum in downtown Philadelphia. The Mutter (the “u” has an umlaut; you say it, “Myoo-ter”) displays medical anomalies and artifacts from the collection of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It is a very serious museum, but it is also a total creepshow. It’s a place for people seriously interested in medicine and human anatomy, but it’s also a terrific place to take 12 year old boys.

They’ve got a MASSIVE preserved colon from some poor soul who would go a whole month without being able to move his bowels. It looks like Baby Jabba the Hutt. They took 40 pounds of poo from the thing after he died. Can you imagine? You don’t have to imagine: it’s in the Mutter Museum. They had the conjoined liver of Chang and Eng Bunker. I mean, honestly, what’s not to like? They’ve got lots of fetuses in jars, included a Siamese twin fetus that has a smiling face on one side of its conjoined head, and a frowny face on the other. The most awe-inspiring, lunch-losing exhibit of all is the Soap Lady, an extremely fat woman who died in 19th century Philadelphia, and who, owing to conditions in her grave, I guess, saponified — that is, her massive fat turned into soap. Read this amusing description of a visit to the Mutter.

They have a superlatively odd gift shop too. I wish I had bought the Conjoined Twins Gingerbread Cookie Cutter when I was there, but now I’m going to get it online.

“This is where the Addams Family goes on vacation,” Matthew said. True. And then we went out and stuffed our faces with pizza, followed by ice cream at the godlike Franklin Fountain. So it was a good day, though I’m still unsettled about having looked upon the pickled and saponified bodies of human beings, most of them freaks, on display. It doesn’t seem right, somehow. Don’t get me wrong, the museum is a medical institution, and doesn’t present them exploitatively. Still, it just didn’t sit well with me. After we left, I talked with the boys about how hard it must be to be a physician, and have to steel yourself in the face of grotesque examples of human suffering (as well as ordinary suffering that makes people like me extremely squeamish).

It also was instructive to us to see preserved examples of the effect of diseases like smallpox and leprosy on the human body. People these days have no idea how hideous life used to be before modern medicine. I mean, you read about it in books, but nothing is like seeing how disfiguring these diseases once were.

So look, go to the Mutter Museum, but listen to me, don’t even think about doing so after having eaten. And leave the little kids at home. You don’t want them having some of this stuff in their heads, unless you look forward to being up all night dealing with nightmares.

UPDATE: Scott Lahti draws our attention to this wonderful essay about visiting the Mutter by a NYTimes art critic. Excerpt:

That was the thing about the Mütter. It was not really a museum about illness, dying and death. It was an anthology of exceptional lives lived, occupying that sweet spot between science and art. You might start out there gaping at someone’s distended colon or some human skeleton but end up pondering the life, or lives, that that colon and that skeleton represented. A vanished world re-emerged out of the specimen jars and formaldehyde.

I like to think that Ignatius Reilly would love this place.

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