After Breakfast, I went to the Mutter Museum

Entrance to the Mutter Museum

The secret tumor of Grover Cleveland, the thorax of John Wilkes Booth and a really big 9-foot colon are just a few of the wonders that you can expect to encounter at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, a museum of historical pathology containing about 20,000 fluid-preserved anatomical and pathological specimens, models, medical instruments, and memorabilia of famous scientists and physicians.

The inside was beautiful.

See the “Soap Lady”—the body of a woman who died of Yellow Fever during the 19th century that turned into soap due to the chemical properties of the soil she was buried in.

Then there’s the huge 9-foot colon of a man who took a dump only once a month for his whole life until he died. It is perhaps no great surprise that he only lived into his late 20s.

If that wasn’t enough for you, there are skeletons of a giant and a midget, various skull collections, the brains of epileptics and a murderer, and drawers filled with objects removed from the windpipes of choking people.

The woman is Madame Dimanche, or Widow Sunday. She lived in Paris around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The horn on her forehead attained a length of 9.8" by her eighty-second year, having begun to form six years earlier. It was successfully removed by Br. Joseph Souberbeille (1754 -1846), a noted French surgeon.

Feast your eyes on a plaster cast of the conjoined twins Chang and Eng, various baby deformities and many more displays that will fascinate you and make you feel totally creeped-out.