Weirdest Museum in the World....The Mutter - Philadelphia



 

 

Jim and Joe..the two headed baby

 

 

 

Wax casting of lady with horn growing out of her forehead

 

The Mutter Museum, a medical museum in the Center City, is a part of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It was founded by a retired surgery professor of Jefferson Medical University. In terms of medicine, the museum supplies valuable information to specialists or medicine enthusiasts. Opened in 1863, Mutter Museum now has around 20,000 objects including anatomical specimens preserved in fluid, archaic medical tools and plain old weirdness.

One of the most special objects which is exhibited in the Mutter Museum must be President Grover Cleveland's malignant tumor. He had undergone a surgery to replace his hard palate with a plastic one. In addition, a woman’s corpse called “Soap Lady” is still a mystery to scientists until now. The body of this obese woman turned itself into a soapy substance when she died.

 

Hyrtl Skull Collection: A wax mold of a woman with a horn growing out of her skull is among the objects on display in this collection. There are several skulls on display showing untreated conditions of the head. The tallest skeleton is seven foot six . There is a nine foot colon containing over 40 pounds of fecal matter. Many wax models from the early 19th century are on display as are numerous preserved organs and body parts. The museum also hosts a collection of teratological specimens (preserved human fetal specimens) all of which were donated to science; the conjoined liver from the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker; a piece of tissue removed from the thorax of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth; slides of Albert Einstein's brain and a section of the brain of Charles J. Guiteau who assassinated U.S. President James A. Garfield.

Chang and Eng Bunker

 

 

Soap lady

 

Gretchen Worden (1947-2004) remains perhaps the best known person associated with the Mütter Museum. She joined the museum staff as a curatorial assistant in 1975, became the museum's curator in 1982 and its director in 1988.

Worden was a frequent guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, "displaying a mischievous glee as she frightened him with human hairballs and wicked-looking Victorian surgical tools, only to disarm him with her antic laugh" and appeared in numerous PBS, BBC and cable television documentaries (including an episode of Errol Morris' show First Person) as well as NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" on the museum's behalf. She was also instrumental in the creation of numerous Mütter Museum projects, including the popular Mütter Museum calendars and the book, The Mütter Museum: Of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

During Worden's tenure, the visitorship of the museum grew from several hundred visitors each year to, at the time of her death, more than 60,000 tourists annually.  After her death, the Mütter Museum opened a gallery in her memory. In an article written about the gallery's September 30, 2005 opening, the New York Times described the "Gretchen Worden Room":

 

 

Anatomical display of the throat

There are jars of preserved human kidneys and livers, and a man's skull so eaten away by tertiary syphilis that it looks like pounded rock. There are dried severed hands shiny as lacquered wood, showing their veins like leaves; a distended ovary larger than a soccer ball; spines and leg bones so twisted by rickets they're painful just to see; the skeleton of a dwarf who stood 3 feet 6 inches (1.07 m) small, next to that of a giant who towered seven and a half feet. And "Jim and Joe," the green-tinted corpse of a two-headed baby, sleeping in a bath of formaldehyde.

Nine foot colon removed from the enormously swollen abdomen of a man in the nineteenth century

 



Although Worden was known for using humor and shock factor to garner interest in the museum, she nonetheless was respectful of museum's artifacts. In the foreword of The Mütter Museum: Of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, she wrote "While these bodies may be ugly, there is a terrifying beauty in the spirits of those forced to endure these afflictions."