Monday, November 1, 2010

Get Thee To the Mutter Museum!

A place where one could do many productions of Hamlet because there are LOADS of skulls.
There could be interesting variations of Hamlet too, because there are human skulls, animal skulls, shrunken heads....and tons of other body parts including full bodies (of siamese twins) in jars.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, Ben and I went to the Mutter Museum which is part of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia for Halloween.

We were not allowed to take pictures of the abundance of medical oddities, but you can take their virtual tour here and you can see the sliced sections of a man's face, Fibrodysplasia (curvature of the spine) and a set of conjoined twins. In a jar.

There was a display of weird medical contraptions such as the Iron Lung, the Pedoscope, and a birthing chair (shudder.)

Possibly the coolest part was the exhibit on the assassination of Lincoln and Garfield. We can now say we've seen both John Wilkes Booth and President Garfield in person, in the form of little preserved pieces of them from their respective autopsies.

In addition we saw, which you can't on the virtual tour I don't think, the gigantic skeleton (7 feet 9 inches, I think?) and the...dun dun DUN... MEGA-colon! 25 inches wide...gross!

It's a little gross, for example, I had a hard time looking at babies in jars and the 70 pound ovarian cyst, but I really liked the bones of the fetus exhibit from...when they develop bones to 9 months. They're pretty much a little blob of goo for the first tri-mester.

So, yeah. If you're in the Philly neighborhood, get to the Mutter Museum. It's worth it.
...And there's an umlaut over the u. So it's pronounced Mooter Museum. They're apparently a little touchy about that.

Stay tuned for more Philly News (since I'll be there to stay in roughly 8 weeks) and of course, NaNo rants.

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