13 Super Weird And Disgusting Things At The Mütter Museum

In 1813, physician HF Nordeman stated, “Nothing is more satisfactory than the treatment of venereal warts.” The Mutter Museum displays genital warts strung like a necklace to simplify study.

Doctors use lasers and liquid nitrogen to remove and freeze genital warts today. They numb the area with a local anesthetic first. Early 19th-century doctors burned warts off with nitric acid. The local anesthetic involved a groin shot using an eight-percent cocaine solution.

In 2009, a 23-year-old woman gave the Mütter a gift: two jars filled with skin pickings and peelings from her feet. Her identity is unknown. She suffers from Dermatillomania, the obsessive need to pick, peel, and scratch skin, which causes scarring, discoloration, and sometimes tissue damage.

Hirschsprung’s Disease, a birth condition causing undeveloped nerves in the colon, made this man’s colon eight-and-a-half feet long, two-and-a-half feet wide, and filled with 40 pounds of feces at death. Corrective surgery was rare in the 19th century and seemed too risky.

The owner of this swollen colon man called himself “Balloon Man” and “Windbag.” He performed in freak shows, charging a dime for a peek. Balloon Man died in 1892 at age 29, after nine years in the shows. By age 16, Windbag only defecated about once a month.

In the 19th century, only criminals’ remains were shown publicly. Regular people avoided associating with that group, so donating one's body to science was not popular. Grave robbing and moulages, like the one pictured showing late-stage syphilis, were popular instead.

How would this patient get treatment? They would lock the patient in a box with mercury fumes. This usually ended the patient before the syphilis did.

Harry Raymond Eastlack was born in 1933. At age five, he broke his leg. The break did not heal right. His joints stiffened. Bone grew into his thigh muscles, and Eastlack got fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP). This rare disease makes minor trauma cause bone formation in muscles, tendons, and ligaments.

Bone grows over the joints, trapping the person in a skeletal prison. With no treatment available, Eastlack died of pneumonia in 1973. At that time, he could only move his lips.

The horn growing from a woman's forehead at the Mutter is a moulage. It is a medical sculpture made using Renaissance techniques. Moulages led to several medical advances.

The woman whose protuberance forms the Mutter's human horn moulage had that growth removed after six years.

The Soap Lady is nearly two hundred years old. Adipocere, a waxy, greasy, soap-like substance forms on cadavers when body fat mixes with moisture and bacteria without air. Adipocere slows decomposition, acting like mummification.

Exhumed in 1875, the body showed partially intact clothes and jewelry. The buttons' manufacture date suggests she lived in the 1830s. Autopsies found she died around age 20.

The Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella was grim. The stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to fit a slipper. In 2012, at the 200th anniversary of Grimm’s Fairy Tales publication, Mütter showed rare illustrated volumes and a skeletal bound foot to examine the medical side of these gory stories.

Thomas Stolz Harvey, a pathologist at Princeton Hospital, took Albert Einstein’s brain when he died in 1955. He cut the brain into 170 pieces. He hid the pieces under his desk in a cider box beneath a beer cooler.

Physical proof of Einstein’s genius exists. His large inferior parietal lobe and a missing Sylvian fissure suggest he processed sensory data differently than average people.

Conjoined twins got their original, wrong name (Siamese Twins) from history’s most famous pair:Chang and Eng BunkerBorn in Thailand (then Siam) in 1811, Chang and Eng joined at the lower chest. They did not share a liver, but their livers were connected. The Bunkers arrived in America in 1829. They toured as sideshow performers before settling in North Carolina and marrying non-conjoined, non-twin sisters.

They became successful farmers. Between them, they had 21 children.

In the 19th century, Viennese anatomist Dr. Joseph Hyrtl tried to prove phrenology. This 'science' claimed cranium mapping determined personality and illness, but quacks controlled it. To do this, Hyrtl collected and studied heads.

Hertz's 139-skull collection includes colorful entries like Francica Seycora, a famous Viennese lady of the evening; Araschtan Gottlieb, who killed himself at age 19 after his mistress cheated; and a man who removed his own male organs (skull pictured above).

Charles J. Guiteau was a failed lawyer and unsuccessful newspaper man. He also shot President James Garfield in July 1881, claiming, “god told him to shoot the president.”

Doctors autopsied Guiteau and focused on his brain. They tried to link his erratic actions to criminality, citing tiny blood vessels and gray matter decay. Twenty-first-century scientists dismiss this. They attribute Guiteau's actions to malaria and neuro-syphilis.

Dr. Chevalier Jackson helped develop bronchoscopy. A doctor shoved a fiber optics thread up your nose, down your throat, and into your lungs. You owe Dr. Chevalier Jackson thanks (among other scientists).

Jackson collected 2,374 swallowed objects over his 75-year career. These included toys, buttons, screws, and dentures taken from respiratory organs. His most dangerous surgery involved pulling three safety pins from a nine-month-old baby.