On S.
22nd Street in Philadelphia, amid the handsome sandstone apartments and artisan
coffee shops, stands an unassuming building with a sign in white and blue that
reads: The College of Physicians. “Just another medical school,” the
causal passerby might think with a yawn. Why bother stopping? Far more
eye-fetching monuments beckon around the corner. The Greek Revival
magnificence of Philadelphia’s Museum of Art comes to mind, or the baroque
splendor of City Hall. Nothing about The College of Physicians makes much
of an impression. Not counting The Forum, a triple X movie theatre
a block or two away, it is located in a sedate residential neighborhood; and
then there is its name—so straightforward and institutional sounding.
From the outside, The College of Physicians holds all the promise of a
doctor’s waiting room: wall-to-wall carpeting, cheap water-color prints,
piles of dog-eared magazines, and the nose-wrinkling and pervasive odor of
disinfectant. You could easily imagine one of Baudelaire’s urban
strollers walking past the place without a second glance; in search of more
exquisite sights and sounds, the flâneur would press on in the
direction of Rittenhouse Square. No doubt, he would laugh in disbelief
when told that he had just snubbed one of the world’s most unique museums, a
collection that boasts over “20,000 unforgettable objects”—many of them human remains.
The initiated, however, know better: those who have
made the trip to Philadelphia’s famous anatomical institute, coming by train or
on foot, and have climbed the worn steps leading to the college; those who have
patiently waited in line to pay the $10.00 admission fee, where visitors
exchange nervous glances—the marble foyer echoing with excited voices. I
confess that, as I waited among them, I wondered if it wasn’t too late to
change my mind. Just turn around and walk away. Did I really need
to know what lay beyond the vestibule furnished with reddish brown leather
couches and dark oil paintings of scientists and doctors? What about the
name of the museum’s founder, Thomas Mütter, whose German appellation is carved
in heavy black letters above the narrow entrance to the gallery?
In 1858, Thomas Dent Mütter, Professor of Surgery at Jefferson
Medical College, bequeathed his personal collection of anatomic and
forensic materials to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Over the
years, the Mütter has garnered an obscure if sensational reputation.
Locals refer to it as “the museum of death.” Once inside, the Mütter presents
the viewer with a strange series of paradoxes: the mahogany repose of a
gentleman’s library, where atrocities of every possible type are catalogued and
exhibited; an institute devoted to medical progress that offers one freakish
spectacle after the other. On public display is a fantastically enlarged
colon, jars of fetuses in every stage of development preserved in formaldehyde,
dozens of skulls and skeletons, a fully preserved corpse known as “the Soap
Lady,” and numerous shrunken heads. To call the collection
“unforgettable” is an understatement. The museum will transform your
ideas of what it means to be human. If it doesn’t, you might want to
check your pulse. After leaving the Mütter, you will realize that the
human body is capable of anything. Physicians refer to the body in terms
of “systems” and “structures” but they do not come close to describing the
chaos that ensues when, say, a human head begins to grow horns or an organ is
found to contain tumors with teeth and hair. It is impossible to look
upon this wild proliferation without awe and terror. Not surprisingly,
the men and women who have spent their lives working in close proximity to
disease and death exhibit a fascination with the macabre that exceeds the
purely clinical demeanor required of the scientist. However disturbing,
the Mütter houses numerous “mementoes,” among them physicians’ notebooks and
instrument cases bound in human skin.
The tanning of human leather represents what Lisa Rosner might
refer to as the dark side of the Enlightenment. A professor at Richard
Stockton College of New Jersey, Rosner is the author of The Anatomy
Murders, which can be purchased at museum’s gift shop. In her
acknowledgements, she cites the support of the College of Physicians of
Philadelphia, and reading her book you sense that she has spent long hours
there and disapproves of many of its traditions and practices. While her
book focuses on Burke and Hare, two of the 19th century’s most
notorious murders, Rosner devotes many pages to “the man of science who abetted
them in their crimes.” Over a period of twelve months, Burke and Hare
murdered sixteen people—three men, twelve women, and one child—and delivered
the corpses to Dr. Robert Knox. Knox paid his suppliers well and asked no
questions. Body snatchers had long satisfied the anatomists’ need for
subjects by robbing graves. Burke and Hare took the unfortunate business a step
further by suffocating their victims and then selling the corpses for
profit.
Rosner is a conscientious researcher. Her book represents
heavy-going, although you can’t help but be impressed by her persistence and
thoroughness. She wants the reader to understand the tragedy of the
Edinburgh murders and to underscore the fact that medical progress owes a
tremendous debt to the poor and disenfranchised. Her prose can’t compete
with masterpieces like Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde. She is a historian, not a
novelist. Nor does her tendency to cite her sources at length and inject
the book with large doses of period language succeed in enlivening her
style. On the other hand, Rosner does an excellent job of raising
questions that many of us today, benefitting from medical horrors past and
present, would simply rather not ask.
