Mutter Museum (old post that never got out of draft form)

From 2006ish

Mutter Museum
We took the creative writing class to the Mutter Museum yesterday. It was an inspired choice on my co-teacher (Sebastian)'s part. He had been there before, I hadn't. He wanted to have the students write a description of something in the museum and write a list poem about it. I was a little concerned because I've heard about some of the unpleasant things in the museum, and I always get nervous taking the kids places. But they handled it fine, and I think for some of them it was a good way to broaden their knowledge of the city. We walked about ten blocks to get there.

The Mutter Museum's focus is medical history. It manages to be both informative and more entertaining than any freak show at a state fair. (I have unfortunate experience with freak shows. When I was in high school I was a "volunteer" to get contorted into this coffin-like wooden box. They had me move certain ways and then they put a bunch of wooden pegs in so it looked like I was all twisted up. I wasn't actually uncomfortable, just a little embarrassed when everyone walked by and looked in at me. The announcer guy took up a collection--a hatful of dollar bills--to compensate me, but he only gave me the price of admission.)

Many of the shelves in the Mutter Museum are full of glass jars with pale specimens in them. Upstairs I saw Grover Cleveland's tumor, an undefined "piece of" John Wilkes Booth, a wax model of a woman with a human horn, and a collection of skulls, some with bullets lodged in them, some with holes. One case held a collection of skeletons of babies from one to eight months old. These were especially strange because they were stretched as if standing -- I'm used to seeing pictures of babies in the womb, but they're always curled up. At the top of the stairs was a blackened adult cadaver, but I didn't get close enough to see what that was. Upstairs is also an impressive collection of information and pictures of conjoined twins.

Downstairs was even weirder. We looked at the skeleton of a man who was 7'6", the second-tallest skeleton displayed anywhere, next to the skeletons of a normal-sized person and a little person for comparison. In a relatively dimly-lit downstairs room were jars full of parts of people. A breast-cancered breast. A piece of tattooed skin. Babies forever preserved in glass jars. The one that affected me most was a big jar with a pair of conjoined twins. The water level was down, so it only covered up to half the eyelid of one of the twins. The tops of their heads were out of the water. Their faces were sweet, peaceful, just like regular sleeping babies. One of the male students stood next to me, and said, almost inaudibly, "that could have been a person." In contrast, one of the girls said a pair of legs with dried skin intact looked like beef jerky.

But the most appalling thing in the museum was a tour guide talking to a large group of kids who were maybe five or six years old. One little girl stood in front of the giant skeleton and said she was scared.
"There's nothing scary here," the tour guide said brusquely. "These are all things that are inside your bodies."
Every time a kid asked a question, she said, "I'll get to that." (The implication was if you'll all shut up already.)
Other snippets of dialogue I wrote down:
"I need your eyes. I'm waiting for three people. I'm waiting for one person. Still waiting for one person..."
"I asked nicely three times. The next time I ask will not be nicely."

This woman was scary. Sebastian and I went over and looked at a drawer of things people had swallowed (buttons, jax, etc.) so we could listen to her. As the little kids left, I heard one say, "I never want to go to a museum again!" Another answered, "I never want to go anywhere again."

Unlike the little kids, I had seen plenty of things that prepared me for this museum: the smoker's lungs in a jar that they bring around to middle schools. The Body Worlds exhibit at the Franklin Institute. The driver's ed car crash carnage video. A video of Faces of Death that I tried not to watch with my boyfriend and his friends in high school (it deeply affected me anyway, even though I had my head in the couch most of the time.) It's okay as long as I don't think about the stories of these people. They're mostly anonymous -- donated by doctors who performed surgeries or autopsies. All they know about the "giant" skeleton is that it came from Kentucky, and that one of the conditions of purchase was that no questions be asked about its history.

It was a perfect creative writing trip, because it had the potential to stir all the questions and emotions that lead to good writing. It covered the major subjects: death, birth, tragedy. If I hadn't been with the kids, hadn't had to keep my own emotions in check, it probably would have affected me differently. If you can look at it as entertainment or science, as a freak show, it's fun. But if you start thinking, "that kid could have been a person, not a perpetual baby...it could have been buried and flowers could have been brought to its grave. It could have been loved." That gets into different territory altogether. (The territory of good writing, I suppose.)