MEDICAL HISTORY WONDERLAND
Museum honours pioneering doctors
“Where are the shrunken heads?”
Any day you get to ask that question is a good day.
When the answer could easily be “Go right at the orangutan’s brain, and they’re just past the leper’s leg,” that’s the best day, because that means you’re at the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
The Mutter is a world-renowned medical museum and a wonderland for anyone curious about the human body — especially what happens when we are visited by illness, injury or conditions that cause our morphology to deviate from the norm.
The first thing you notice inside the museum is 139 human skulls, in long, neat rows — a Costco of the Damned, if you will.
This is the collection of anatomist Josef Hyrtl, meant to show the diversity of Caucasian craniums in Europe and debunk the theory of phrenology, which held that skull shape signalled intelligence and “racial differences caused anatomical differences,” as per the Mutter’s website.
The Mutter’s collection is so fantastic — from the unique specimens such as fetal twins conjoined at the skull, to the slice of Einstein’s brain, to something as average as a human heart — that until you see something like the skull collection, it’s easy to forget that these are teaching tools. The giant megacolon, a human colon about the size of a rolled-up carpet, is a perfect example of why this is so important. It’s the colon of a 29-year-old man who had Hirschsprung ’s disease, in which nerves in the colon don’t develop properly and waste doesn’t move along; it just accumulates. The man died in 1892. The condition now is easily treated, relieving one aspect of human suffering via the advance of medicine, which is something physician Thomas Dent Mutter was all about.
This museum “honours several pioneer doctors from the 19th century,” devoted to the college’s mission to “advance the science of medicine and to thereby lessen human misery,” Mutter curator Anna Dhody says via email. “Obviously none more so than our namesake Dr. Mutter.”
One medical model on display was brought to the U.S. by Mutter in 1831, when he returned from studying medicine in Paris. The model is of Madame Dimanche — a woman who had a horn growing out of her forehead, curving to just below her chin. It was eventually removed by surgeons. In her book Dr. Mutter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz writes that in this model, Mutter “saw his future.”
Indeed, he would become a pioneer in the field of plastic surgery.
In our culture, it is characterized by buoyant breasts and overinflated lips. In Mutter’s time, it was revolutionary — and far less elective. A popular teacher and exemplary surgeon at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, he became well-known for his work on burn victims and those with conditions such as a club foot or cleft palate. He invented a surgical technique called the Mutter flap — variations are still in use today — and was the first surgeon in Philadelphia to use ether anesthesia in the mid19th century, which invites us to imagine what surgery was like without it.
Aptowicz’s beautifully written book describes how Mutter advocated for things that we now take for granted, such as aftercare and cleanliness, and about his gentle empathy with his patients. He bequeathed his medical collection to the college and donated US$30,000 (more than US$800,000 today), which made the museum possible. One stipulation of his bequest was the collection’s ongoing use “for educational and scientific purposes through our Center for Education, and the Mutter Research Institute,” Dhody says.
The crowd today, lots of live humans entranced by the experiences of dead ones, would make him very happy. You can’t avoid learning something here. Why do we like this stuff ? Oriana Aragón, a psychologist and assistant professor in the marketing department of the College of Business at Clemson University,
suspects that there is a trifecta of reasons that make some become moths to the Mutter’s flame.
First, there’s “evocative emotion,” a bit of an adrenalin rush from the shock of seeing the amazing things our bodies are capable of and seeing it in person, not on a screen, so we can fully believe it.
“They’re seeking the feels” of awe and intrigue, she says.
Second is access. Anything we learn about our bodies can contribute to our survival; here, we’re getting classified information.
“We’re not doctors; we don’t get access into this world,” she says.
Finally, Aragón says, “when you consider someone else’s experience relative to your own, you’re mapping their experience onto your experience.” You’re empathizing, wondering how, for example, you would go through your day if you were conjoined with a sibling.