Medical Oddities

The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia is a great place to see preserved brains, pathological treasures and anatomical memorabilia. While not for the faint of heart, it provides a one-of-a-kind look at the medical wonders of the human body.

By: Amy Brummer

Photo from Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia by Gretchen Worden
Above, "Chang and Eng Get Together," William Wegman’s photograph of a plaster cast made following the autopsy of two Siamese twins. The photo is part of the museum’s recently published book.

   Walking through the marble lobby past wood-paneled walls is no preparation for what is in store. Behind the glass of handsomely appointed cabinets, specimens of all shapes and sizes confront you with their eternal deformity.
   Tucked away in one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious institutions are an assortment of oddities: a giant human skeleton, Grover Cleveland’s tumor, the shared liver of conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, and the mega colon, which looks even stranger than it sounds. For anyone who has difficulty with the notion that staring is impolite, the Mutter Museum is the place to have a gander.
   In 1856, Thomas Dent Mutter, a professor of surgery at Jefferson Medical College, bequeathed his collection of 1,344 medical pathology specimens and models, along with a $30,000 endowment, to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. This gave the private medical society the means to exhibit, maintain and expand the collection, which provided an excellent complement to the institution’s existing holdings and comprehensive medical library.
   "I talk about the sense of permission that we give you to look at what is strange and unusual as long as you want," says Mutter Museum Director Gretchen Worden. "No guilty pleasure, no sneaking a peek. People are naturally curious about our congenital abnormalities, and these are the things you see in sideshows. Well, here it is presented very straightforwardly so you can look and learn."
   Ms. Worden, who graduated from Temple University with a degree in physical anthropology, began working for the museum in 1975 as an assistant to the curator, moving her way up the ranks to acting curator in 1980, curator in 1982 and director in 1988. Through the decades, she has been witness to many exciting developments and discoveries that only reinforce the importance of the collection.

	Above, Dr. Charles Humberd (left) and Dr. Joseph McFarland with the Mutter giant. Below, X-ray of a swallowed toy battleship.
	Photos from Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia by Gretchen Worden

   One example is the Soap Lady, a 19th-century woman whose fatty tissue turned to adipocere, a soap-like substance that preserved her body. In 1987, a radiographer teaching at Jefferson College, Jerry Conlogue, used her to teach his students how to use a portable X-ray machine, which exposed 19th-century pins in her spine, contradicting the original belief that she had lived in the 18th century. Mr. Conlogue returned several years later to perform a CT scan on the body with his co-host, endoscoper Ron Beckett of National Geographic’s Mummy Roadshow. The CT scan showed all of her internal organs, providing new information about adipocere, which is important in the study of forensic science.
   Because of the rarity of many of the subjects, their continuing use as study material has proved invaluable. The case of Harry Eastlack, a man born with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, a genetic disorder that causes bone to form in the soft tissue, is the most complete history of a person with the disease. To this day, doctors still study Mr. Eastlack’s skeleton, which provides new information to treat the several hundred patients who live with the disease today.
   "Harry is a good example of how we can actually contribute to what is going on now in medicine, for the doctors and also the patients," Ms. Worden says. "It has been proved time and again that this material is still valuable."
   But it is not only valuable to medical professionals. Ms. Worden has seen many changes over the years, including the reinstallation of the exhibition space in 1986, but the most significant may be the shift in the demographics of museum visitors. When Ms. Worden first began working at the museum, the attendance would range between 3,000 and 5,000 a year, often comprised of high-school biology classes, art classes and visiting physicians. Today, she says the general public is outnumbering the medical community, with lots of college students and families coming for visits.
   "If the adults are interested, the kids are going to be fascinated," Ms. Worden says. "If they are going to leave here seeing something that they never even thought existed, they are going to learn just from that.
   "Not everything is as well labeled as we would like it, but still, if you have the visual experience of seeing a woman with a 6-inch horn coming out of her head, you have learned that people can grow horns, because if you see it in the Mutter Museum it is real."
   One reason why the museum may have seen such an increase in attendance over the years is due to the success of its yearly calendars, produced since 1993. In addition to archive photographs, the calendars include work from some of the country’s top photographers, among them Shelby Lee Adams, Arne Svenson, Max Aguilera-Hellweg and William Wegman.
   "Fine-art photographers were already coming to the museum taking pictures of what we already had," Ms. Worden says. "So it was when I met Laura Lindgren, who was at that time publishing with Grove Press, and now has her own publishing company called Blast Books. Laura just fell in love with the museum, and her brother is a photographer, so we got thinking, ‘How can we take what they are doing and use it to the advantage of the museum?’"

Photo from Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia by Gretchen Worden
Above, "Harvest," by Joel-Peter Witkin, a photograph of a wax model of the head and thorax showing the lymphatics of the neck.

   The calendar gave the museum promotion through bookstores nationwide, resulting in numerous reviews and media attention. In addition to several appearances on National Public Radio, Ms. Worden has appeared on Errol Morris’ First Person and Late Night with David Letterman, where she brought a giant hairball from a horse for show and tell.
   After nine years of producing the calendar, the staff decided they had amassed enough material to publish the book that would become their signature text. Authored by Ms. Worden, the book, Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (Blast Books, 2002, $50) acts as something of a conjoined twin in its relationship to the collection. While they are inextricably joined by subject matter, the book transforms the specimens into a whole other being.
   While the museum is fairly clinical in its description and presentations, the photographs in the book recognize the beauty in the subjects, even in their deformity. Removed from their museum setting, the specimens are reborn in the eye of the photographer. Arne Svenson’s portrait of a club-footed skeleton doesn’t even show the feet. Instead, he opted to capture the penetrating emptiness of the eyes and coy tilt of the head. William Wegman’s photograph of his weimaraner, Bettina, with her face buried in a specimen exhibiting kyphosis of the thoracic spine, is an elegant study in form.
   It also provides a window into the fragility of human existence by raising questions about the lives of these people and the artist’s ability to evoke sentiment and compassion. Max Aguilera-Hellweg’s picture of a 30-week fetus with acrania is one of the book’s most arresting images, although it was not appropriate for the calendar.

	Photo from Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia by Gretchen Worden
	Above, tattoo of the Brooklyn Bridge from the 1890s.

   "He was showing me the Polaroid and he showed me the image of the child down in the boiler room," Ms. Worden recalls. "I said ‘Max, you know we are not doing fetuses in the calendar, you know we can’t use that one.’ Instead, he reshot it using the fetal pig with the proboscis-like nose, which we used. About two years later, he told me that he had the opportunity to submit a photo to a gallery, and he said the one photo he wanted to submit was that one. He felt too strongly about the power of it to him personally."
   It is interesting to contrast these passionate photographs with the artwork presented in the museum’s upcoming show, One Man Died: Medical Adventure on the Lewis and Clark Trail. In celebration of the bicentennial of the famous journey, the exhibit highlights the medical training that Meriwether Lewis received in Philadelphia from Dr. Benjamin Rush prior to their departure.
   The period prints that illustrate medical procedures of the time and illustrate 19th-century life are charming and informative. In addition, the exhibit includes Dr. Rush’s medicine cabinet, examples from a 19th-century pharmacy and surgical instruments of the time. It also illuminates the health risks they faced as well as methods they used to overcome them, such as purging or blood-letting.
   "We tend to think that any medicine before now was primitive or ignorant, or totally overrun by superstition," Ms. Worden says. "At that time, they actually had a system of medicine, a way of thinking about disease and what would cure it that made sense to them. Back then, if you ran a fever, an excess of blood caused it, your face reddened, and you let some blood out, and it actually worked, and people got better with the treatments of the time. It was very pragmatic."

Illustration courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
"Breathing a vein," above, was first published in London by H. Humphrey, Jan. 28, 1804. Part of the Only One Man Died exhibit, the title refers to the then common medical practice of bloodletting.

   That element of common sense and logic also aided in the overall success of the mission that only yielded one casualty, Sgt. Charles Floyd, who suffered from an acute gastrointestinal disorder.
   "It was a military discipline with military planning," says Charles Greifenstein, archivist and associate director of the library. "That is one of the reasons we can say the expedition started in Philadelphia. Lewis did a lot of his planning and gathering of supplies in Philadelphia. Thinking ahead about what they would need literally two years down the road was very important to the success of the expedition.
   "They have medical supplies, they have trained men, they have all of the knowledge that they can accumulate about the West. Someone once said that we knew more about the moon when we sent men there than they knew about the West when (Lewis and Clark) set out. It seems more familiar traveling over mountains, but they stepped completely into the unknown. Maybe that is the source of fascination with the expedition."
   For Ms. Worden, the exploration into the unknown has driven her career. The terrain she covers is as foreign to many of us as the Rocky Mountains were to Lewis and
Clark.
   "I have learned so much about things I never thought I would be interested in," she says. "It’s all so fascinating. I used to think that history was one of the most boring subjects until I came here and all of the sudden I needed to know the history of something, and that is when it started making sense. People think medical history is a really esoteric subject, but it is about why this stuff is here."
The Mutter Museum is located at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 19 S. 22nd St., Philadelphia. Only One Man Died: Medical Adventures on the Lewis and Clark Trail runs through 2006. Hours: Daily 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission costs $8, with discounts for seniors and students. For information call (215) 563-3737. On the Web: www.collphyphil.org