Medical mishaps featured at·local museum

By Karin Letcher a&e editor

There are no Van Goghs or Monets gracing the walls of this museum.

Instead, the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia is home to thousands of examples of medical oddities and abnormalities. Strong-stomached visitors to the museum are greeted with items like a colon the size of a large dog, preserved fetuses with a variety of sickening mutations and a woman whose body decomposed completely into soap.

Although the Mutter Museum's original and still-intended purpose is educational, there is a Jot of nauseating fun to be had within the small and dark, two-floor confines of the museum. Those who visit the museum can be both enlightened and grossed-out at the same time.

Once a place where only medical students and others involved in the medical profession came to observe and learn, today the Mutter Museum's most common guest is a member of the general public.

Formed in the 1850s with the private collection of pathological specimens of the museum's namesake, Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter, the museum now contains over 20,000 objects.

Included in the current collection are approximately 900 fluid-preserved samples, 400 models made of plaster, wax, plastic and papier mache, 200 pieces of medical mementos from well-known physicians and scientists and 1,500 illustrations in various forms.

Similar to most museums, the Mutter Museum also displays special exhibits. Presently, there is an exhibit featur- ing the intriguing history of conjoined twins.

It is difficult to single out specific highlights of the Mutter Museum because there are just so many interesting objects, ranging from the informative to the sickening. The Chevalier Jackson Collection contains over 2,000 objects, like bones, coins and dentures, that have been swallowed and surgically removed. There is a plaster cast of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, as well as their preserved attached livers, swimming in formaldehyde. The autopsy of the twins, who reportedly had many children, was performed in the museum in 1874. A variety of skin diseases, such as gangrene and scabies, are on display on the actual arms they infected. One of the most frightening models is a replica of an infant with a rather large cystic tumor of the buttocks.

Of course not everything on exhibit in the museum promotes physical illness. The history of medicine and its practitioners are represented with items like a reproduction of the first heart-lung machine, a stethoscope supposedly made by its inventor in 1816 and Florence Nightingale's sewing kit.

One can even view body parts of deceased famous people in the Mutter Museum. A tumor secretly removed from the jaw of President Grover Cleveland while he was still in office bobs around in a jar. The thorax of President Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is also on display.

A trip to this house of horrors and education is highly entertaining and recommended. However, if you do decide to visit the Mutter Museum, give yourself plenty of time to digest your last meal before you go.

Mutter Museum information

Hours:

Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Ad~sion:

• $® for students with valid college I.D.

• $8.00 general admission for adults

• $16.00 family rate

Location and phone number:

19 South 22nd Street in Philadelphia~ (215)563-3737

How to get there:

From Cabrini, take 476 north to 76 east (Schuykill Expressway). Get off at the 30th Street Station exit and follow to Market Street. Take a left onto Market Street and then a right onto 22nd Street. The Mutter Museum is located within the building that houses the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.