Inside The House Of Horrors

Last week, after dropping off my wife at the Philadelphia Airport, I drove into the heart of William Penn’s excellent city for an afternoon of solitary adventure. It was a freakishly torrid, icecap-melting day in April; the air seethed with premature midsummer heat, and I sought refuge in the shaded halls of a place I had heard about but never visited until now. Yes, this would be the right day for my first visit to the Mütter Museum. 

Stately old Philadelphia is a city of ghosts and curiosities, a city shunted to the sidelines of relevance by upstart metropoli like L.A., Atlanta, Seattle, Austin and Orlando. Most tourists drive in to catch a glimpse of the vastly overrated Liberty Bell, then drive right out again. They miss the sleepy residential streets and secret alleys lined with 18th-century townhouses; they overlook the haunted places. The traveler with an appetite for the macabre will find much in Philadelphia to reward his investigations: the vast labyrinth of the Eastern State Penitentiary, once visited by Dickens and now more desolate than ever... the brick house near Spring Garden Street where Poe wrote ‘The Raven,’ and the turreted one in Germantown that inspired the Addams Family mansion... a grassy square used as a burying ground for Revolutionary War soldiers, and said to be haunted by a hunched woman in a cloak. Then there’s the Mütter Museum.

The Mütter ranks among the world’s foremost collections of medical specimens, both normal and bizarre (but mostly the latter). Among its most illustrious possessions are the preserved livers of original ‘Siamese’ twins Chang and Eng, the cancerous mouth tumor removed in secrecy from President Grover Cleveland, and a slice of pickled flesh from the actual throat of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. 

The museum is tucked away inside the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, an august institution founded the same year the U.S. Constitution was framed. On that broiling April afternoon last week, I entered the marble halls of the College and surrendered my $8 for a ticket to the museum. With a mixture of dread and gleeful anticipation, like a ten-year-old at his first horror movie, I found the secret doorway to the Mütter and strolled inside. First I meandered through an informative but relatively mundane exhibit on the history of infectious diseases; it was all text and no gore. This wasn’t exactly what I came to see, but I kept pressing forward through the narrow convoluted corridor.

Finally the walls opened up and I found myself in a room devoted to the medical crises of the U.S. Presidents. There were the actual transcripts of FDR’s fearsome blood pressure readings from 1944, the year before he finally popped an artery. There was a lifelike model of the nasty (and little-known) carbuncle on George Washington’s leg. The brain in the nearby jar belonged to the late Mr. Charles Guiteau, assassin of President Garfield. (It looked surprisingly fresh for an organ that had been out of commission for 120 years.) I nearly missed the piece of Booth’s throat, removed during his autopsy and now simply a vile gray lump resting in another jar. I imagined those mute cells vibrating to the words 'Sic semper tyrannis' as the perpetrator leapt to the stage at Ford's Theater. In a neighboring jar rested Grover Cleveland’s excised tumor -- imagine, a relic of a dead president! -- all white and floppy and formless. I had expected something darker and more sinister, but it sufficed.

The darker part of the museum loomed ahead, through a portal that led to the two-story main gallery. Here was the central chamber in the house of medical horrors. I was stepping back into a Victorian world of meticulously housed specimens in tall glass cases with burnished antique wood trim. 

I saw the miniature skeletons of conjoined and otherwise malformed infants... an ovarian tumor the size of a turkey... a mummified example of a fatally distended colon, looking vaguely like a python that had just swallowed a wild pig. I gawked at a noted collection of mostly European skulls, painstakingly labeled to indicate the country of origin and cause of death. (The majority seemed to be executed convicts, paupers or suicides, and nearly all of them had extraordinarily bad teeth.) I recoiled at the specimens of two dried children, one of them mounted in a grotesque parody of a crucifixion, its innards eviscerated to reveal the delicate network of blood vessels. I shuddered at the charcoal-gray body of the 200-year-old ‘Soap Lady,’ stretched out as if in a glass coffin, her jaws open forever in a silent scream. Surely this was the prankish creation of a Hollywood studio, a prop for an old Roger Corman horror film, but no -- she was on display as an example of adipocere, a condition in which a corpse essentially turns into a colossal bar of soap.

Downstairs, in the lower gallery, I saw not only Chang and Eng’s conjoined livers but a plaster cast of their heads and torsos taken in death. Chang, who died first (and mercifully fast), looked like a man who had found inner peace; Eng, who had to watch his own life ebb away after his brother expired, bore a visible grimace on his face. Around the gallery were more skeletons (a dwarf and a giant, as well as an unfortunate man whose muscles started turning to bone), finely crafted models of syphilitic faces and eye disorders, bones of Civil War and World War I soldiers with the fatal bullets still in place, fetal skeletons at various stages of development, and, for me, the most affecting exhibit in the entire museum: a human head that had been cleanly cross-sectioned into half a dozen slices to display the nasal cavities, the brain and other cranial contents. The face transfixed me. Smooth and serene, hairless except for the eyelashes, of indeterminate age and gender, it looked like an angel in a medieval Flemish painting. Here was suffering humanity facing me with surreal calmness and composure, as if all the afflictions in the world were powerless to ravage its spirit. Then I remembered the Soap Lady and her silent scream.

As I left the world’s most scholarly freak show, I thought about what I had seen: the horror and the pity of human flesh, preserved from decay to instruct, edify and scare the bejeezus out of future generations. We who still live can never know how our own deaths will feel or how we'll look -- whether we’ll go out with the placid countenance of Chang or the grimace of Eng. Our fleshy bodies are eternally vulnerable and prone to disaster. To see them encased in glass, preserved in all their extravagant aberrations, made for a poignant and sobering afternoon. I would recommend the experience to other hardy souls, but I’m relieved that nobody has yet assembled a Mütter Museum of the human mind. Imagine being exposed to all the agonies, evils and perversities of our species in a walk-through exhibition hall. It’s just as well that the mind is invisible, and that it gives potential museum curators nothing to display.

Cynic's Pick of the Week

Well, the Roman Catholic Cardinals of America have spoken. And what did they decide? They're determined to screen out all the gay (and even latently gay) applicants to the priesthood! That's sort of like Broadway producers refusing to hire gay actors, isn't it? Will these bumbling church leaders ever consider the obvious: that adolescent males shouldn't be cajoled into duty as altar boys? I still say altar GEEZERS are the only way to go.