Not Your Average Tourist Spot

Ah, summer, when a person's fancy turns to – road trips! But where should a devil-may-care healthcare gadabout go? To the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of course.

The Mütter Museum, located within the stately, late-Georgian halls of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (CPP), is sometimes disparaged as a "baby-in-a-bottle freak show," but this label is simplistic. The museum owns more than 20,000 objects, including approximately 900 fluid-preserved anatomical and pathological specimens; more than 10,000 medical instruments and devices; approximately 400 models in plaster, wax, papier-mâché, and plastic; and slides, photos, drawings, prints, and memorabilia of famous scientists and physicians. Wherever possible, the story of the person behind an object or specimen is provided, along with information about the condition, injury, or specimen.

The CPP was founded in 1787. It is a self-described "not-for-profit educational and cultural institution dedicated to examining the medical sciences and their place in society in order to enhance the understanding of medicine and the roles of physicians in history and in contemporary life." When the CPP started its Museum of Pathological Anatomy in 1849, it was for doctors and medical students. They still visit. While taking notes for this article, I was asked, "Are you a medical student, too?"

The Soap Lady

Gretchen Worden, the museum director and former president of the Medical Museums Association, often hears from healthcare professionals strolling down memory lane while looking at the historical equipment. She gives the example of nurses looking at the functioning 1949 Emerson iron lung, and recalling the chafed wrists that resulted from working with patients in the device and how, during power failures, staff had to come running to operate the machine manually.

Watch Out Kids, You Might Learn Something!

School groups, particularly biology and health career classes, regularly use the museum. In 2001, it had more than 30,000 visitors, of which more than 9,000 were students taking advantage of the museum's teaching materials on medical genetics and infectious diseases. In a typical exercise, after a teacher explains the concept of DNA, the students go through the museum to pick out specimens that illustrate particular concepts, such as genetic inheritance and congenital anomalies.

Cephalothoracopagus Babies

But healthcare professionals and students no longer constitute the majority of visitors. These days, most visitors are tourists, locals looking for something out of the ordinary to show out-of-town guests, and parents seeking to awe their children with exhibits such as Dr. Chevalier-Jackson's 2,000-plus-piece collection of items (e.g., dental appliances, nails, game pieces) removed from patients' food and air passages. I eavesdropped on one mother reminiscing with her young son: "Oh, look! Remember when you swallowed one of these? But it went all the way down!"

And the museum is not solely historical. Its current College Gallery exhibit is "Emerging Infectious Diseases: Ancient Scourge and Modern Menace," a look at old, new, and everything-old-is-new-again diseases. Compare the drawing of the garments worn to protect medieval doctors from the Black Death to the modern CDC biohazard suit: they're vaguely similar in appearance, though the same cannot be said for their efficacy.

But Are They "Freaks"?

Worden insists that the specimens are not freaks, just illustrations of the wonders of the human body. She believes that it's all right for people to stare, and to do so for as long as they want. Of course, healthcare professionals probably won't be scared away by even the more graphic specimens, such as the giant colon or the wax cast of Madame Dimanche, a 19th century French woman with a 10-inch cornu cutaneum coming out of her forehead.

Or by Harry Eastlack, a Philadelphian who suffered from fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), a rare disease affecting an estimated 2,500 people worldwide, in which normal bone forms in muscles and connective tissue, creating an extra skeleton that immobilizes the body. (The FOP Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia is the world's main center for FOP research.) Harry died in 1973, and his skeleton was donated to the museum. But he still gets out, having recently attended a medical symposium, so that the doctors could see how the condition looks. As Worden explains, "There's only so much that can be seen with X-rays, and we must remember that the dead teach the living."

Harry Eastlack

People are still offering their bodies, or body parts, to the Mütter collection. Standing offers exist from a 90-year-old poet with Paget's disease in the tibia and a woman with scoliosis. Partly, people do this because they want to help others with the same condition. But more, they do so because they know that the museum will continue to mix respect for the dead with education, while giving people a chance to see things they don't normally see. And what could be a better use of a summer road trip?

Other options at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Fascinating medical specimens not your thing? How about medicinal plants? Take a walk through the CPP's Benjamin Rush Medicinal Plant Garden, and park yourself on a bench amidst the four parterres and learn about traditional medicinal plants, and their therapeutic and poisonous properties. (Hmmm ... why are so many of the plants for venereal disease and flatulence?) Interested in history? Visit the Historical Library and F.C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, and check out (ha!) books, journals, archives, and manuscripts dating from 1244 to 1965. Need health information? Visit the reference collection in the C. Everett Koop Community Health Information Center. Want to know more? See the College of Physicians of Philadelphia website.

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