If strange places and academic places were ranked in importance, the Mutter Museum would rank at the top for both categories. Located in Philadelphia, it houses an expansive and gruesome collection of items to provide education for medical professionals, and just creep out the rest of us. It's primary web site asks, "Are you ready to be disturbingly informed?" Exhibitions include Civil War artifacts including body specimens with the opportunity to imagine what it would have been like to have an arm amputated. Educational? Other charming items include surgical instruments, a huge collection of human skulls, and slivers of Einstein's brain. Additional bodies and bits are proudly preserved, originated from the collections from Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter, who was devoted to medical education.
I imagine the visit would be fascinating. Rows upon rows of organs floating in jars, hundreds of articulated skeletons, and dehydrated body parts.
When I was a student in the college of medicine, one of our labs centered on the dissection and examination of cadavers. These real bodies were invaluable to learn about the layers of muscles, the tiny articulated bones, and the fascinating web of membranes that made up the body in front of us. But it always remained in the back of my mind that this was the shell of a person, a real, thinking, caring person who gave a gift for me to learn.
And in a very real way, once you learn of the complexity of the human body, the frailty and the miraculous symmetry, you see the design in the form and function.
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