The Mutter Museum

The Mutter Museum has got to rank among the most weirdest places in the world. Established by Thomas Dent Mütter in 1856, the Museum was intended to display medical rarities. Today its collections contain some 20,000 human specimens and medical instruments from the 19th century to the present.

Located in the Rittenhouse Square area of Center City Philadelphia, the Mutter Museum houses a collection of nineteenth-century medical oddities. Mutter Museum exhibits include an enormous 50-pound distended colon, taken from the body of a man who dies of constipation; the liver shared by famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker; and the exhumed body of an obese woman whose fat turned posthumously into almost 100% pure soap. If you're looking for things to do in Philadelphia and want a break from the usual historic tourist sites, the Mutter Museum is the place to go.

The heart of the Mutter Museum Philadelphia is taken from the collection of Thomas Dent Mütter, who gathered various medical and anatomical oddities to educate nineteenth-century students. By the time he died, Dr. Mütter had gathered a collection of over 1,700 bones, models, and preserved body parts. Since his death, the College of Physicians has added to the Mutter Museum collection with like objects, including a cancerous tumor that was secretly removed from President Grover Cleveland's jaw while he was in office, the thorax of presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth, and bladder stones from James Marshall, former chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Today there are over 20,000 items in the Mutter Museum exhibits.

President Grover Cleveland's jawbone. There are bones shattered by bullets, others showing wounds, breaks, etc., and skulls bearing the personal data and medical history of their owners. Particularly fascinating is a cast of the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, who were sixty-three at the time of their death in 1874. The chair they used is here, a pathetic small wooden one, and their liver has been preserved in a jar. An entire drawer is devoted to buttons, coins, and other objects that have been retrieved from human stomachs.

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