The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia looks like any other respectable establishment in the United States: a trim brick building with an American flag outside.
But behind its doors lies a remarkable medical collection of the dead, diseased and disfigured that has attracted visitors and tourists for decades but is now at the center of a roiling dispute over the ethics of such exhibits in the 21st century.
In common with many other leading art institutions and museums across the US – and the rest of the world – the Mütter is plagued by questions around the provenance and rights of acquisition of its collection of the grotesque.
Earlier this year, the Mütter took down its collection from its website and began an audit of 35,000 objects and specimens in its archive of anomalies and oddities.
Spurred in part by a 1990 law ordering the return of Native American remains, it has set about developing new ethical guidelines for display. Though with about 50 sets of Native American remains, the Mutter’s issues are slight compared to the august institution of Harvard, which has 7,000.
The notion of an ethics review alarmed fans of the museum who feared that a new director would turn the focus of the museum from death and disease and toward health. “A shake-up at the Mütter Museum means it could get way less weird,” worried the Philadelphia Inquirer, calling the museum “disturbingly informative” and “uniquely Philadelphian”.
From its founding in 1858 as part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Mütter stands alongside the UK’s National Museum of Health and Medicine, the Hunterian Museum, the Surgeons Hall, UCL Pathology, Bart’s Pathology, and the Vrolik Museum.
Among its collection are unusual or deformed organs, an iron lung and Einstein’s brain. There is the death cast and the conjoined liver of Chang and Eng, the original “Siamese Twins”; the body of a woman known as the “Soap Lady”, whose remains are encased in a fatty, post-death substance known as adipocere; and the skeleton of the 7ft 6in “Kentucky giant”.
But there is also the skull of Francisca Seycora, the “famous Viennese prostitute”; along with 139 crania used by Viennese anatomist Josef Hyrtl to disprove 19th-century phrenology theories that intelligence can be measured by the skull’s size and measurements.
Critics of the Mütter ethical overhaul do not dispute that some exhibits, including the Soap Lady (seemingly grave-robbed), Einstein’s brain (he wanted to be cremated) should be removed or overhauled, along with that of the New Orleans sex worker Mary Ashberry, an achondroplastic dwarf who died in childbirth along with her infant.
Instead, says paleopathologist Hanna Polasky, who spent three years at the museum, the institution has also focused on human fetuses – something guaranteed to spark fierce debate in the US.
“The museum is quoted as saying they make them uncomfortable, yet we know they were donated with maternal consent,” Polasky says. “The issues that are being dealt with are not the legitimate issues, rather the perceived legitimate issues.”
The Mütter Museum executive director, Kate Quinn, told the Observer she was not personally uncomfortable with the fetuses and finds the specimens in the museum “fascinating”. But she accepts that visitors’ views are important too, especially in a changing America very different from when the collection began as a way of educating doctors.
“That’s something we need to look into,” Quinn says. “Is that who we want to be and how we want to be perceived? The world has changed so much in the past five years, and every institution, due to the pandemic and social unrest in the US, you have to ask yourself: what is the role of a museum in the world today? Why are we here, why do we exist, and who are we here to serve?”
Medical specimens, Polasky points out, are different from the now-removed Ecuadorian shrunken heads in the “treatment of enemies” cabinet at Oxford’s anthropological Pitt Rivers Museum. The Mütter was created not to study other cultures, but instead to teach and advance medical science. Notions of consent, too, are comparatively recent in such a field, though many would argue they are also long overdue.
The Soap Lady, for example, was donated with fraudulent information about her cause of death or the gravesite from which she was exhumed. “The paperwork in a lot of cases does not exist,” says Polasky. “The idea of repatriation is an incredibly attractive idea, but when it comes to human remains there are a lot of legal issues around reburial.”
The issues confronting the Mütter revolve around whether museums should be answerable to scholarship or public sentiment. Quinn said the Mütter is due for review. “Most museums change much more often, and that hasn’t happened here. It’s been set in time, and it’s healthy for any organization to do,” she said.
The ethics review, of course, will get into those issues of consent. “Who gave permission to be here and what were their expectations when they gave up their bodies?” Quinn added. “There are a lot of ethical challenges that will come from this.”
But that may not be good news for the Mütter’s ardent enthusiasts, of whom there are many, especially in Philadelphia, where the museum is often seen as a valued part of local culture.
A pressure group, Protect the Mütter, is concerned that even the iron lung, used to treat polio victims, may be at risk despite that exhibition offering a salient warning to contemporary anti-vaxxers. The displays of syphilitic organs may be useful, too, as that disease appears to be regaining a foothold.
Sam Redman, the author of Bone Rooms, a recent study of how medical museums became storehouses of human remains, has said that beyond their educational role for physicians, the institutions “helped satisfy visceral desires and macabre curiosities”. Open to the public, “medical displays subverted dominant social norms by placing bodies, body parts, or visible pathologies considered too shocking for public display into a more socially acceptable context”.
Redman believes the US is witnessing a tension that has existed within and around medical museums since their founding. “People have always been simultaneously drawn to them and reviled by them in almost equal parts,” he says. But the addition of the internet has made it more public that the acquisition of medical knowledge has not always been ethically clear.
Recently, the biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific reached a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman from Baltimore who had had cervical cancer cells taken from her and used, without consent, for research 70 years ago. The so-called HeLa cells led to numerous scientific discoveries.
But, says Redman, “when these shocking stories come forward, we’re often pushed to confront the question of where does our medical knowledge come from, how have we arrived at it, and what happens to our bodies when we die. These are pretty fundamental human questions. It’s easy to see why the Mütter museum controversy strikes a nerve.”
• This article was amended on 13 August 2023. Kate Quinn is the executive director, not a curator as an earlier version said.
