Try to hold your lunch down as you visit the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.
5 gross things inside Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum
- A saponified corpse.
- Slices of Albert Einstein’s brain.
- A decaying, syphilis-riddled skull.
- The death cast of conjoined twins.
- A giant ovarian cyst.
If you still want to visit the Mutter Museum, buy tickets here.
For more gruesome detail, read on.
Philadelphia’s most weirdly compelling museum
Philadelphia’s a great – and massively underrated – city, packed with top drawer art and history attractions. It has some fun stuff too, but in terms of worthy, high class brain food tourism, Philly is superb: there are probably at least 10 museums that any even mildly geeky visitor will merrily lap up.
But you can list them all out, agree that they sound marvellous, yet still feel absolutely compelled to beeline it to the Mutter Museum first. Because, frankly, the Mutter is the place with all the weird skulls and body parts in jars.
Philadelphia’s anatomical museum
Inside the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, this gloriously macabre collection of anatomical awfulness is definitely not a place to visit on a full stomach. The extremely weird collection veers from mementos – Pierre and Marie Curie’s electrometer, an inkstand used by Edward Jenner – to the downright gruesome.
In the main room is the corpse of a woman whose body has saponified – chemical changes turned the body fat all soap-like, with the consistency of a semi-hard cheese.
5 great things to do in Philadelphia
- 🥖 Taste the best of Philly on a food tour – including historic Reading Market.
- 🏛️ Get to know Philadelphia’s heritage sites – on a guided walking tour.
- 🍻 Go on a pub crawl – but learn the history between beers.
- 🎨 Let a guide show you Philadelphia’s best murals and street art – including Magic Gardens.
- 🌙 Discover Philly’s dark side – on an adults-only night tour.
Slices of Albert Einstein’s brain
Next to this is a cabinet containing microscopic slices of Albert Einstein’s brain – apparently it was 15% bigger than that of the average human before the guy who conducted his autopsy cut it up and sent pieces to researchers around the world.
Turn the corner, and its skulls aplenty. It’s the labels on these 150-plus year-old specimens that makes them A Bit Special. One from the island of Lissa in Dalmatia has the man’s name, age and the brief description of ‘Idiot’. Another from Corfu died from a dagger thrust, while one from Switzerland belonged to a “cretin” with congenital thyroid deficiency.
Wax models of skin diseases
But we have to move on, because next come the jars with wax models of skin diseases. There’s a decaying skull with secondary syphilis, a hand and forearm riddled with smallpox and a pustulous head dotted with nodular leprosy.
Freak show monsters in the Mutter Museum
That this isn’t even the worst of things is testament to how grim things are when you head downstairs. Here come the ‘monsters’ – or, after you’ve read the stories – desperately unfortunate people born with horrendous deformities who were pilloried or turned into freak shows. There’s one tale of a stillborn baby from Germany that was known as the chicken man for the comb-like structure on its head, large round eyes and claw-like hands. There are also conjoined twins who were paraded around in a circus, with the death cast of Chang and Eng Barker, who were conjoined at the sternum, on display in a glass case.
The collection keeps ramping up. In one jar, there’s a parasitic foetus with three legs. A skeleton of a 7ft6in giant is stood next to that of an achondroplastic dwarf. There’s also a huge overgrown colon that you’d struggle to fit in a good wheelbarrow, accompanied by photos of the poor soul it grew inside.
Photo ban inside the Mutter Museum
The thing is, though, the giant ovarian cyst, foetus with 46 twists in the umbilical cord, ruptured gall bladder and all aren’t presented in a gaudy, tasteless way. In fact, photos are banned inside because these are real people with real families and ancestors, while there are surprisingly good attempts to explain possible neurological symptoms on display in famous books such as Frankenstein and Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. It’s simply a bizarre collection, diligently collected for over 150 years and displayed with a genuine desire to educate.
But while intentions may be noble, it’s a fair bet that most visitors are here to get a level of gore they’ll not see in the Independence Hall or Museum of Art…
More Pennsylvania travel
There’s a big range of Philadelphia tours and activities to choose from here.
Other Philadelphia travel articles on Planet Whitley include:
- Review of the Benjamin Franklin Museum in Philadelphia.
- Review of the very weird Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.
- A practical guide to visiting the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
- How Philadelphia’s historic attractions provide an introduction to America’s past.
- Tips and practical information for visiting the Liberty Bell Center.
