Many institutions got rid of their specimens, likely disposing of them as medical waste or, in some cases, passing them on to the Mütter. Collections of pathological specimens came to be associated more with P. T. Barnum-style sideshows than with medical scholarship, although the two categories hadn’t always been clearly delineated. “There’s been a lot of resistance to the idea that medical schools even had collections like this,” McLeary said. “Someone at Penn was, like, ‘I don’t believe we ever had a collection like the Mütter’s.’ ” (They did.) “I think they’ve been memory-holed.”
The Mütter might have become an obscure collection, of interest mostly to historians, if not for a woman named Gretchen Worden. In 1974, Worden wrote to the Mütter’s curator asking for a job. She had a degree in anthropology from Temple University and no full-time work experience. “As for vital statistics, I was born in Shanghai, China, on September 26, 1947. I have since grown to a height of five feet, eight and three-quarters inches and can get things down from a seven-foot shelf. I am fairly proficient in English, barely proficient in French, and have forgotten most of my Russian,” she wrote. In lieu of a résumé, she included her college transcript. Worden was hired, and spent the rest of her life at the museum.
Anatomical collections like the Mütter’s had long inspired feelings of fascination and shame about the human body. In Victorian London, the proprietors of anatomical displays were sometimes prosecuted for indecency. For many years, the Hunterian museum was open only to medical professionals, “learned men,” or “respectably dressed persons.” But Worden, who became the Mütter’s director, promoted the museum through multiple appearances on David Letterman’s late-night talk show, where she showed off objects that made the audience groan or erupt in shocked laughter. (“Good Lord,” you can hear someone say, after she shows Letterman a photograph of a wax model with gnarly facial lesions.) She and the publisher Laura Lindgren invited artists, including William Wegman, to photograph the collection for a calendar distributed in bookstores around the country. Worden also cultivated the museum’s distinctive Victorian atmosphere: heavy velvet drapes, red carpets, wooden cases packed with specimens. As some institutions got rid of their anatomical collections, Worden snapped them up. “I am almost totally fulfilled here in this job. It’s everything. It’s art, it’s science, it’s bones, it’s anatomy, pathology, it’s contemporary medicine. I just couldn’t be happier,” she once told the Philadelphia Daily News.
Regal and unapologetically odd, Worden shaped the museum in her image. Questions of spectacle and propriety circled the Mütter even then, but Worden’s ample charisma, her confidence in the validity of her own fascination, seemed largely able to keep them at bay. She saw the museum as a place for “humans looking at humans,” somewhere that “treats people as if they’re grown up enough to take a look at what’s under the hood.” By the end of her tenure, attendance had grown more than tenfold.
Worden died in 2004, at fifty-six, after a brief illness. An article in the Times noted the “motley crowd” that gathered for her memorial service at the museum, which included “dignified-looking surgeons,” “Philadelphia society matrons,” and “a couple of sideshow impresarios.” The mourners sang “Babies in Jars,” a song composed to the tune of “My Favorite Things.”
Valerie DeLeon, the anthropologist, began a two-year stint as the president of the American Association for Anatomy in 2021, as her field was coming under intense scrutiny for its treatment of human remains. DeLeon convened a task force to devise best practices for institutions with historical collections of remains, an area with hardly any regulatory guidance. She felt that it was important to move quickly. “The members that I represent needed help now,” she told me. (The University of Florida, where she is a professor, was weighing how to handle its own anatomical teaching collections.) The task force included anthropologists, anatomists, and museum professionals. They agreed that it was important to treat human specimens with dignity and respect, but they disagreed about what that meant in practice. Some argued that, given the presumptive unethical taint of such collections, human remains should be buried or otherwise respectfully disposed of. Another faction argued that the societal benefits of continuing to research, teach with, and display human remains outweighed the harms to people who were, after all, long dead.
Human tissues “hold an ethically intermediary place between inanimate property and living beings,” the members of the task force wrote in a report, which was published in The Anatomical Record last year. First, the group had some thorny discussions, DeLeon said. Just how much of a body counted as a person? Did a bone shard have the same level of personhood as a full skeleton? What about teeth, or tumor cells? Should fetal remains be considered part of the mother or a separate person? Did the long dead occupy a different status from those who had died more recently?
In the report, the group laid out its guidelines, which recommend taking cultural context into account when determining how to display or dispose of remains, given that practices such as cremation or postmortem display may be considered traditional by one culture and taboo by another. Whenever possible, the A.A.A. recommends consulting with “communities of care”—descendants or others with an interest in and a connection to the remains. But it’s not always clear who is best positioned to speak for the dead. “For many remains, even within my own institution, we literally have no idea where they came from,” DeLeon said. “So what do you do with those?”
In Philadelphia, I met Kate Quinn, the Mütter’s executive director, in one of the College of Physicians’ anterooms, whose walls were lined with mahogany bookshelves and oil paintings of eminent physicians. Quinn had an air of guarded professionalism, and for most of the interview she was flanked by both a P.R. representative and her new boss, Larry Kaiser, a thoracic surgeon who had recently been named the president and C.E.O. of the College of Physicians.
Cartoon by Hartley Lin
After Quinn’s hiring, in 2022, she quickly moved to professionalize the Mütter, helping to establish policies for ethics and beginning the process of applying for accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums. She sometimes received calls from people who had been told by Dhody that the Mütter might acquire their body parts; Quinn told them that the museum wasn’t doing that at the moment. She oversaw an audit of the collection, the first in more than eighty years. “I had the expectation that we would find that maybe two or three per cent of the collection had been given to us with consent,” she told me. “But we’re finding it’s much, much less than that.”
Stacey Mann, a consultant who was brought in by Quinn, told me it seemed that the collection was haphazardly catalogued, with some things apparently acquired because of their value as curiosities rather than as medically informative specimens. “They found two of these baby skulls in the library that were linked to this woman who was, I guess, a murderess,” Mann said. (The bodies were discovered in a trunk after the woman, Stella Williamson, died, in 1980; the exact circumstances of their deaths are unclear. The museum is helping to arrange a reburial.) “Every month, there’d be another thing that was, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
Quinn also spearheaded something called the Postmortem project, an example of the kind of institutional self-critique that has become popular in the museum world in the past few years. At the Mütter, this has meant providing visitors with visual annotations to the existing collection in the form of green signs. Near the entrance, for example, a sepia-tinged photograph shows the back of a woman’s head. A matted lock of hair trails down her back in calligraphic spirals, an example of plica, a rare disorder. Like many objects in the Mütter’s collection, it is unsettlingly compelling, the distance of time imbuing the pathology with a kind of poetry. “This photo comes from a book of hair samples doctors took from patients with different ethnic backgrounds,” the Postmortem sign affixed to the display reads. “Is this just a picture of hair when you know that it was used to perpetuate racism?” One of the museum’s temporary galleries is devoted to the Postmortem project, and its atmosphere—white painted walls; bright, clean light; exhibits with clear, legible signage—feels like a portal into an entirely different institution. Next to a display about power and consent, visitors are invited to contribute their responses on butcher paper: “SCARY PEOPLE,” “acknowledge the ugly past,” “Wokeness destroys truth.”
