DEAD RECKONING

A museum of medical history asks what we owe the past.

- RACHEL MONROE

The Mütter's supporters saw a celebration of human difference. But new management saw an ethical minefield, a distasteful reminder of the sordid history of medicine.

When Anna Dhody was growing up in Philadelphia, in the nineteen-eighties, her mother used the city's museums as a kind of babysitter. “She would just drop me off at the Penn Museum and be, like, ‘Don't touch anything, I'll meet you at the totem poles in an hour,” Dhody told me. One day, when she was in elementary school, her mother took her to the Mütter Museum. “I don’t think she knew what she was getting into,” Dhody said.

The Mütter, a museum of medical history, is stranger and less clinical than that description implies. Its dimly lit rooms are crowded with specimens of physical anomalies and pathologies: stillborn fetuses in jars, slices of faces suspended in an alcoholic solution, a wall of nineteenth-century skulls. One display case features the livers of Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins who were widely exhibited as curiosities during the nineteenth century; in another is the corpse of a woman whose fat transformed after death in an unusual form of natural preservation called saponification. The Soap Lady, as she is known at the Mütter, has rough, blackened skin, and her mouth is open, as if in a scream. A banner outside the museum, which was founded more than a hundred and sixty years ago, reads “Disturbingly informative.” Every so often, a visitor faints.