Few museums in America are as unusual as the Mütter Museum, a medical history museum whose anatomical specimens, pathological preparations and medical instruments are at once educational, beautiful, and deeply unsettling. The Mütter Museum was founded by Thomas Dent Mütter, a Philadelphia surgeon who donated his collection of two thousand medical teaching specimens to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1858, with an endowment to maintain and expand it. The collection grew to include a section of Albert Einstein's brain, the conjoined livers of the Chang and Eng Bunker, the tallest and shortest skeletons in North America side by side, a wall of 139 human skulls assembled by Viennese anatomist Josef Hyrtl, the soap lady — a corpse whose adipose tissue transformed to a soap-like substance called adipocere after burial — and thousands of objects extracted from human bodies by physicians over two centuries.
The museum makes no apologies for its subject matter and does not soften the experience for squeamish visitors. It is, however, one of the most thoughtful explorations of the human body and the history of medicine in the country. Admission is required.