March 28, 2017 – The Mutter Museum

I made a choice not to visit the Community College of Philadelphia today and instead to visit another museum.  The reason was weighed on a scale of benefit to my professional development and was heavily tipped by the nature of the museum I had the opportunity to visit.  Those readers who are more visually oriented will likewise be disappointed by the lack of photography accompanying today’s blog post.  You see, I chose today to visit the Mutter Museum in downtown Philadelphia.  The Mutter (which should have an umlaut over the U) is the museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and its museum, which has been around for some time arose from its large specimen collection used to teach physicians human anatomy and surgery.  Which is to say the museum is an extensive collection of bones, skeletons, and preserved human body parts, all housed in a stately mansion.  Those of my colleagues who work around the anatomy labs at CCSF will recognize and understand the strict no photography rule for the museum.  The museum had a few salons devoted to thematic subjects (Civil war wounds and medicine, birth defects, and art inspired by the collection) but the heart of it (so to speak) was three or so rooms lined wall to wall and floor to ceiling with glass display cases.  Each case was packed with specimens either dry or wet mounted along with a good number of realistic wax castings of disease states.  You know those pages of the medical textbooks that you turn to in order to use the pictures to gross out your classmates?  Now imagine a whole gallery of such information… Absolutely fascinating… 

 The museum had a large collection of human skulls collected around the world, owing to a bygone eras fascination with biometrics and race… but what stood out in the collection were the individual clinical conditions and oddities.  Medicine, being a biologically based science, has inherent in it much natural variation, coupled with a tradition of learning from case studies.  If something absolutely peculiar, like a three legged baby or conjoined twins or an exceptional brain like Albert Einstein’s presents itself (and variation over time does present us with such examples) the medical interest is to save the specimen so others can learn from it, preparing themselves for the sorts of variations they might encounter in their practice.

I mention this not only because of the tradition, but because education in this tradition is changing.  As I’ve toured the country looking into how other colleges teach Anatomy and Physiology it has been painfully clear that CCSF is an exception and most two-year colleges do not employ any human tissues, and minimal animal preparations, in their Anatomy education.  The vast majority of colleges I’ve seen only use standard models.  These are preferred by the institution as being more economical, and preferred by the student as the model represents a single condition or appearance that need to be mastered.  The assumption is that the application of the structures represented by the models and transference of knowledge onto situations of biological variation will take place somewhere else.  But this is exactly where the appeal of anatomy as a science is.  With each new presentation of a person comes variation and uniqueness.  The museum understood this having made its success not in presenting normal condition but oddities like extreme cases of syphilitic disease or Chang and Eng’s liver (they were the famous conjoined Siamese twins employed by P.T. Barnum).  Dwarfs and Acromegalics are the poster skeletons for the Mutter.  How many science museums have you been to that contained real shrunken heads or President Garfield’s tumor? My personal pathos in this day was the dawning realization that our educational future is trending away from valuing the unique or different.  Most educational materials come from universally adopted textbook publishers who supply the same pictures and digital materials nationwide.  The tumor that will now be seen by introductory students will be the same tumor for everyone, even though each pathology is unique.  Individual educational specimen collections are disappearing.  A point underscored a few summers ago when we at CCSF lost much of our unique anatomy specimen collection to a bureaucratic regulation regarding the paperwork associated with keeping human tissues.  It was a classic case of functionary over actual function, and I believe this one event was the final tipping point in my crushed spirit as an administrator at CCSF, because there was no outcry, and there was no shared or communal understanding of purpose and importance of the treasures we have in our CCSF specimen collection… there was, in short, no sense of history…