The Mutter Museum

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

This episode explores the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, tracing its origins from Thomas Dent Mütter's 19th-century medical collection to its modern role as a center for

Key takeaways

• Erin McCleary leads research efforts that cross-reference historical case reports with death certificates to attach names and biographies to previously anonymous specimens.
• Sarah Ray manages interpretation strategy, using newly uncovered personal histories to design more deliberate, narrative-driven exhibits for modern visitors.

Main topics

• Mütter Museum history and curation
• Ethics of human remains in museums

Notable quotes

People often think of us as a museum of the dead, for good reason. We're literally filled with biological specimens, you know, human tissue, parts of dead bodies.

Conclusion

The episode reframes the Mütter Museum from a cabinet of morbid curiosities into a vital educational

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:09) Philadelphia, the 1850s. The city is loud with ambition, and the world of medical education is changing right there on its streets. Speaker 3 (0:27) Students pour into lecture halls in what was already the country's hub for health care innovation. And in the middle of it, a young surgeon named Thomas Dent Muder is building a collection of medical tools and specimens to educate the future doctors of America. Speaker 3 (0:52) Today, this collection fills out a Philadelphia gallery that shares his name called the Mütter Museum. And it has a bit of everything. Instruments, plaster casts, and most famously, or infamously, an abundance of morbid specimens. Pieces of human beings. Kidney stones. Tumors. Skulls. And while it serves as a reminder of medical education of a bygone era, the historians who run it today say its lessons reach well beyond that, to history, to ethics, to the experience Speaker 2 (1:32) of living in a body. People often think of us as a museum of the dead, for good reason. We're literally filled with biological specimens, you know, human tissue, parts of dead bodies. But the interesting thing about... the biological remains in our collection is not that they are dead. Speaker 3 (1:51) Instead, it's that they demonstrate something really specific and unique about life. Speaker 3 (2:02) I'm Jerome Campbell, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we go to the Mütter Museum and meet the two historians who are working to better connect us to the mysteries and beauty of the human body and bring the Mütter Museum into the modern age. Speaker 2 (2:25) You're going to come out of it feeling like you have learned and confronted something really profound about life, but it's very difficult to capture what. Speaker 3 (2:44) To understand the story of the Moodle Museum, it's helpful to see it from the perspective of the two people helming the institution today, Aaron McCleary and Sarah Ray. Erin runs the collection and research department, which digs through archives and identifies the people behind the remains. She's so enthusiastic about the work that she can't keep her findings to herself. Speaker 1 (3:09) Sarah very, always graciously and enthusiastically responds to my random texts about, like, guess whose kidney stone we have. Speaker 3 (3:17) And then there's Sarah Ray, who runs the interpretation and engagement team. They decide how the museum tells its stories. And she's just as enthusiastic. Speaker 2 (3:28) I would probably say 60 % of the most interesting stuff I tell other people about the collection is stuff that I learned from kind of random specialists that I was showing around. So, yeah, and you never know who, you know, where that will come from, which has always been my favorite surprise. Speaker 3 (3:45) Funny enough, both had similar journeys to their roles at the Mütter Museum. Both were trained in history of medicine at Penn. Both worked at the museum for a stretch of time before moving on full-time. But they say their entrance into the work comes from opposite ends of the spectrum. Erin, who first came here as a grad student and intern in the 90s, was drawn by the mystery. Speaker 1 (4:11) I walked on over here and was immediately transfixed. And again, it was like, who? are these people? How did this collection come to be? What story was the collection trying to tell? Speaker 1 (4:28) It just presented to me this sense of mystery that I really wanted to solve. Speaker 3 (4:36) Sarah, meanwhile, was studying the ethics of human remains in a museum studies master's program at Columbia. Speaker 1 (4:43) And Speaker 2 (4:43) as soon as I walked in, I was really drawn into the ethical problem of it. Like a lot of the ways that... ethical and practical issues around colonial acquisitions or indigenous remains in natural history museums and anthropology museums, a lot of that framework doesn't really apply as clearly or as legibly when it comes to medical collections, which tend to be super anonymized and