strange things...the Mutter Museum

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.

Bones and Catacombs

Strange places: bones and catacombs

 

 

 

Deep beneath the pavement of Paris, France, older, even, than some of its more well-known monuments, lies a labyrinth of tunnels lined with stacks of bones.  These are the remains of millions of Parisians, entombed there for all time, in a place that reeks of age and time.  The tunnels are world borne, created by ancient tropical seas which left the layers of stone in their wake as they yielded up to the land.  This limestone then became a vital building block for the civilization that came after it, building great Cathedrals, palaces, and city streets.  The spaces left from the mining were vast systems of passages that became the second grave for many bodies when graveyards were closed in the city.   Now close to six million bodies lay under the city of Paris in an area referred to as “France’s Empire of the Dead”.

 

Visitors to Paris can tour the Catacombs with tour guides and lit passages.  There are reputed to be street signs carved into the walls to indicate where under the city that the visitor is located.  The area is now monitored and protected by police.  But what must it been like before it became a tourist location?  And what of the infinitely more unexplored tunnels?  What might they hold?

 

The bodies were originally moved in the early 1780’s because of the severe crowding in Paris cemeteries and church yards.  Bodies and bones were erupting into people’s cellars.  The extensive space under the city seemed to be a good alternative.  But if your loved one was tucked into one of the cold niches under the city, would you visit with a bouquet of flowers?  If you were looking for a long lost grand relative, would you wade through the tunnels of bones to pay a call?  Under the watchful eye of a guide, I might be tempted to journey into the depths to get a small taste of history, but no further.  I have a healthy respect for the dead and would ultimately want them to rest in peace.  I surely wouldn’t want to bring something back home with me!

 

If given the chance, would you go for the tour?  Would you go with the guide, or are you a more adventurous sort?  Are you the type to creep into one of the hidden entrances to brave the dark by yourself?

Would you be afraid?

 

Thanks to: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184393/Paris-catacombs-The-skulls-bones-inside-Frances-Empire-Dead.html