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Exhibits of the Museum of Medical History in Philadelphia
It is difficult to look at some of the monstrous exhibits. This is a heartbreaking sight and the viewer experiences a real psychological shock. But the picture of anomalies of the human body is extremely attractive from an intellectual point of view. Because it provides an answer to one of the longest-standing questions facing man – how and from what we are created. And as soon as this is realized, the ugliness acquires the features of true beauty.
The Mutter Museum of Medical History is a museum of medical pathologies, antique medical equipment, and biological exhibits located in the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
Actually, it is called a college in the old fashioned way. In fact, it is the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, the most innovative institution of higher education in the United States, opened by Benjamin Franklin...
In 1750, the board of trustees purchased a building for the university that had been built for an evangelical prayer house, and classes began there in 1751. At Franklin's suggestion, the college adopted the motto "Laws without morality are useless" (Leges sine Moribus vanae)...
The original purpose of the collection was medical research and education, but these days, the collection of the Faculty of Medicine has become a museum.
This museum is best known for its huge collection of skulls.
Among them there are also unique exhibits, such as a human intestine 12.5 cm long and the corpse of a woman, which turned into soap in the ground in which she was buried.
The exposition presents many wax models, as well as preserved organs, and even entire bodies...
One of the main exhibits of the Mütter Museum is Gary Eastlak, a man who suffered from progressive ossifying fibrodysplasia (Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, FOP) during his lifetime, a disease in which excess bones form at the site of a bruise or wound...
Before he died at the age of forty, Eastlak donated his skeleton to the museum...
This is an instrument for craniotomy. In previous centuries, it was with such instruments that a hole was made in the skull bone to remove blood clots from the wound cavity ...
The famous Siamese twins Cheng and Eng Bunker (1811 – 1874) with a combined liver...
Photo of conjoined twins taken after autopsy...
The skeleton of a two-headed child...
The skeleton of Siamese twins connected by heads...
The mummified part of the pelvis with the lower limbs...
The mummified head of the child, with the veins and arteries exposed...
A woman with an unusual curvature of the spine... The development of the disease began at the age of 2. By the age of 20, the disease had already affected all the joints of the body, so she could move only with supports...
This is a woman, Madame Dimanche. She lived in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the age of 76, a horn had grown on her forehead, and by the age of 82 it had reached a length of 20 cm. It was successfully removed by the famous French surgeon Joseph Souberbeille (1754-1846)...
A hand with a similar growth on the wrist...
Pathology of the legs...
Private Harvey was wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville on 3 May 1863. A fragment of the shell hit the right eye... So, with a shell in his head, a slight deafness and paralysis of the right side of the face, the private lived until December 9, 1869. He died of an unknown reason...
An unusual tumor on the head...
Successful cases of leg amputation...
A model of a head with facial nerves and an eye modeled from wax shows the connection of the superficial facial nerves with the bones of the skull. Made in Paris around 1880...
Siamese twins after autopsy...
Syphilitic change of tongue...
A baby with hydrocephalus of the skull...
A face preserved with salicylic acid, methyl and benzoate, which make the veins visible...
Dry gangrene of the hand...
A twelve-week-old fetus...
Paralysis of the legs...
Throat cancer...
Hydrocephalus of the skull...
Three-legged Siamese twins...
The fruit in glycerin...
Varicose veins on the head...
The placenta of twins...
A dried hand...
Over the centuries, medical practice has improved... The Mütter Museum has something interesting for anyone interested in the history of medicine...
… Whether it's photos of wounds from the Civil War of the North and South, or the combined liver of the famous Siamese twins Chan and Yong...
Look carefully and... you will envy yourself... It's great that it's not the XVIII century now!
