Located in Center City Philadelphia, the Mütter Museum’s initial purpose was to educate future doctors about anatomy and medical oddities. Now open to the public, its mission has expanded to “tell important stories on what it is to be human”. The exhibits, however, could suggest otherwise: 2000 Objects Collected from People’s Throats, The Soap Lady (who inexplicably mummified to adipocere), skeletons of Siamese-twin infants, among dozens of others. The exhibits are frequented, one could argue, not because they reflect daily experience, but because they exist so beyond what is perceived to be common and palatable.
In high school, I believed the museum was an endless freak show and on occasion would take dates there to elicit their gut-churning. Raised in a Catholic, working-class neighborhood, I was taught that the incurably deformed, the terminally ill, and death itself were never to be pondered or discussed, but feared and eventually mourned. A mysterious black cloud hung over a human’s final moments, where the will to survive was undone by one’s own finite timeline.
In short, a visit to the Mütter was an implied act of rebellion. And how surprised I was, each time, when my dates and I wandered not with nausea, but a shared, unspoken curiosity. Two decades later, my daughter came into the world with meconium jammed in her lungs. If Daisy were born just a century earlier—a blip in human history—I would not be a father. How many teens today know a newborn can die because her tar-like shit went down her throat? And the adults—now that we know that these same lungs can be cleared within minutes—are we any less loving when we lower our heads and kiss the infant squarely, as if we were the ones who needed the blessing?
-Joseph P. Wood
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