The Mütter Museum: Bodies and the History of Knowing

In eighteen fifty-nine, a Philadelphia surgeon named Thomas Dent Mütter donated his personal collection of medical specimens, anatomical curiosities, and surgical instruments to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, along with thirty thousand dollars to house them. Mütter had spent his career treating conditions that the medicine of his time barely understood and sometimes made worse. His collection was, in a sense, a record of everything medicine did not yet know.

The College of Physicians itself had been founded in seventeen eighty-seven, the same summer as the Constitutional Convention, making it one of the oldest medical institutions in the United States. The museum that grew from Mütter's donation became one of the most unusual repositories of nineteenth-century medical practice anywhere in the world.

The collection that visitors encounter today includes the conjoined liver of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins, who lived to sixty-two while connected at the torso and are buried in North Carolina. It includes the tumor removed in secret from President Grover Cleveland's jaw in eighteen ninety-three, an operation performed on a yacht in New York harbor to prevent public knowledge of the president's cancer. It includes approximately two thousand four hundred objects removed from the throats and airways of patients, catalogued by the laryngologist Chevalier Jackson over five decades.

And it includes a woman known as the Soap Lady, whose body, when exhumed from a Philadelphia cemetery in eighteen seventy-five, had undergone saponification, a rare chemical process in which grave conditions converted the body's soft tissue into a waxy soap-like substance, preserving her features in a form that looks nothing like rest.

The museum is not comfortable to visit in the way that most museums are comfortable. That discomfort is partly the point. Before anesthesia was reliable, before antiseptic technique, before X-rays, before germ theory was accepted, the body was approached through inference, intuition, and instruments that look nothing like what surgeons use now. The Mütter collection is the evidence of that approach.