March 28, 2004
Today I went to the Mütter Museum of Medical Oddities (all links are probably safe for work, but dangerous for the squeamish).
When you first enter the Mütter, you're tempted to point things out to others (Hey, look! It's an enormous penile syringe! It's a model of a woman with a horn growing from her forehead! It's a taxidermied infant with a giant anal tumor and creepy beady marble eyes!). After a while, you realize everything here is this bizarre, and you simply go silent.
There's the soap lady, an over-200-year-old corpse (who appears, in my opinion, to be kind of hungry for brains). There's an enormous cabinet that holds a collection of things dislodged from the throats of various individuals. There's a wealth of information about conjoined twins, including the death cast and genuine preserved liver of Chang and Eng Bunker. The skull collection is fascinating, the fetuses in formaldehyde are spine-chilling, and the inner ear organs on display are oddly beautiful.
Keep posting this stuff, babywanna. Same goes for plep. It doesn't pick up a lot of comments because it's not a question or an argument, but it's good good good.
I second that.
[warped, pickled-in-ethanol banana]
I have always wanted to visit the Mütter. Great selection of links.
/reminds self to prepare new will stipulating cremation.
fascinating, but i wonder why i found viewing a vintage collection here at the medical school was less disturbing than these photographs.
Wow! It's like Rotten in real life!
Not only is this post excellent in itself, but "monkey travelogue" makes a good seed for a post.
This interesting program on the Mutter Museum aired on the Discovery Channel a couple of years ago; be on the lookout for reruns on the various Discovery Channel stations as it was incredibly interesting.
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