PHILADELPHIA — On a Friday afternoon in June, Ezra Eisenstein went to the Mütter Museum here to hang out with old friends. There, he paid a visit to Carol Orzel and Harry Eastlack — two skeletons who, in life, suffered from a bone disorder called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. Nearby was Mrs. Ellenbogen, an approximately 200-year-old corpse coated in adipocere, a byproduct of decomposition that gave her the nickname “The Soap Lady.” Her mouth is open in a permanent scream. There was also Francisca Seycora, the “famous Viennese prostitute,” according to the label in front of her skull, which rests on a shelf with dozens of others.
“I can’t wait for you to meet Mary,” Eisenstein, 32, told a trailing reporter. Mary Ashberry was — is — a woman with achondroplastic dwarfism whose 3-foot-6-inch skeleton stands next to a fellow now known only by the nickname the “Kentucky Giant,” for his 7-foot-6-inch frame.
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“This room is where I genuinely feel happiest in the world,” says Eisenstein, dressed in black with a coffin-nail necklace, surrounded by preserved tumors and basketball-size ovarian cysts and bones eaten away by syphilis. Eisenstein, a trans man, loves the museum so much that he tried to donate his uterus and cervix after being diagnosed with cervical endometriosis. (There was initial interest, but the museum stopped responding by the time they were removed, he says.)
There are few places in the world like the Mütter, where the living come to learn from the dead. Since 1863, the museum has collected and displayed historical medical implements, anatomical models, and human skeletons and body parts, which are categorized as “wet” (preserved tissue in jars of liquid) or “dry” (desiccated remains). For those who have a comfortable relationship with their own mortality, it is a beautiful, peaceful place.
Until recently. As Eisenstein perused the exhibits, a security guard followed him — a sign that something was amiss in the land of the living. For the past few months, the Mütter has become an ethical battleground for various groups of stakeholders: a museum leadership that wants to usher it into the 21st century, representatives from historically disadvantaged groups who wish to either preserve or dismantle it, staff members and academics caught in the middle, and fans of the museum — doctors, morticians, goths, the morbidly curious — who feel a special connection to this meaningful and macabre place in Center City.
The bone of contention: While some of the bodies in the museum come from contemporary donors, many had been acquired in an era before medical consent was codified. In the 19th century, doctors who wanted to learn with real bodies would claim the remains of prisoners, suicide victims, poor people, prostitutes, enslaved people, Native Americans and other underprivileged groups — or they would pay off gravediggers and steal from cemeteries. These are some of the Mütter’s “residents,” as staff members call them.
In August 2021, geneticist Mira Irons became the first female president and CEO of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, America’s oldest private medical society, which runs the museum. About a year later, Irons hired Kate Quinn, a former director of the Michener Art Museum, as the executive director of the Mütter and the college’s Historical Medical Library.
This spring, as the first step in an ethical review of the Mütter, museum leadership decided to take down a popular YouTube series featuring stories and human remains from the collection. It also convened a panel of experts to determine whether the residents had consented to spend eternity on autoplay, and to investigate what was known about their lives, so their stories could be properly contextualized.
But current and former museum staff and volunteers began to fear that something else was amiss, as did some medical professionals associated with the College of Physicians. Irons once told staff members during a meeting that she “can’t stand” to look at some of the exhibitions, and later said that they amounted to “a spectacle.” In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Quinn conveyed reservations about exhibiting fetal and infant remains with congenital abnormalities, and expressed a desire to make the museum a place to learn about “health and well-being” rather than pathology and death.
The Washington Post spoke with nine current and former staff members and fellows from the College of Physicians, all of whom conveyed grave concerns about leadership’s vision for the museum. More than a dozen staff members resigned in the past six months. Former Mütter communications and programs assistant Hanna Polasky started a petition calling for the republication of the YouTube videos and the dismissal of Irons and Quinn, and it has more than 31,000 signatures. Former Mütter director Robert Hicks resigned from his position as a senior consulting scholar and, in a scathing letter to the College of Physicians, removed the Mütter from his will. The Post’s interviews with museum leadership were arranged by a public relations consultant who lists crisis communications as one of his specialties.
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Online, the conversation got heated: In June, a viral Twitter thread accused Quinn of trying to “sanitize the museum to deter us freaky goths.” People accused the goths of ableism for wanting to look at the bones of disabled people. Other people accused the museum leadership of ableism for possibly wanting to remove the bones of disabled people. Those who wanted to keep the human remains on display were called colonizers. Those who wanted to take them down were accused, derisively, of “wokeness.” Terse interactions between staff members and “Protect the Mütter” dissidents were branded as harassment by both sides.
And all of that is why Eisenstein, an outspoken Mütter advocate who opposes the new leadership, was being tailed by security. Museum leadership confirmed that it is keeping a watch list, though it wouldn’t specify the nature of the security threat.
“I don’t like being public enemy number one, or even number 12, in the place that makes my soul sing,” Eisenstein says.
The Mütter is a place for people who don’t fit in. And now, Eisenstein fears he can’t fit in here, either.
“People who have always felt othered” — for their physical abilities, their sexuality, their neurodivergence, their interest in death — “find their home in the museum,” says Polasky, the petitioner, who is now a curator for the British Online Archives.
Whether they can continue to do so depends on the answer to one question: What happens when the ethics of the 19th century meet those of the 21st?
In 1841, a young doctor named Thomas Dent Mütter became the chair of surgery at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College, where he was one of plastic surgery’s earliest American pioneers. Mütter fixed the 19th century’s “monsters,” as they were called at the time, and was among the first surgeons to use anesthesia. Upon his early death, at 48, Mütter willed his collection of 1,700 tools, models, anatomical parts and bodies to the College of Physicians, along with $30,000, on the condition that it “hire a curator, maintain and expand the collection, fund annual lectures, and erect a fireproof building to house the collection,” according to the museum.
Viewing preserved remains was one of the ways that doctors learned their trade. Practicing on unclaimed corpses was considered to be both ethical and legal, thanks to an 1883 Pennsylvania law called the Anatomy Act. But some Mütter residents were not unclaimed: The Kentucky Giant was sketchily acquired in 1877, on the condition that the museum not ask any questions about his origins. The Soap Lady’s name is probably not Mrs. Ellenbogen, because that came from a falsified record used to obtain her body through “connivance.”
In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which mandates that federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funding return Native American “cultural items” and bodies to descendants and tribes. The Mütter’s collection, which has grown to include more than 25,000 artifacts, includes the remains of at least 48 Native Americans, according to NAGPRA manager Melanie O’Brien. (Several have already been returned.)
But there are no laws that govern the return of remains from other underprivileged classes, such as former enslaved people. And many remains in the Mütter’s collection have little or no information that would allow them to be identified.
“In my view, we’re still far from settling the ethical issues surrounding human remains,” says Sam Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of “Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums.” “Because I think we’ve yet to fully grapple with their history and their legacy. We have yet to fully humanize who these people are in response to being made into scientific specimens.”
For many of its displays, the Mütter does an admirable job of humanizing the people encased in glass. Harry Eastlack’s and Carol Orzel’s stories are told in displays beneath their skeletons, and Carol is exhibited, per her wishes, with some of her jewelry. Text for the collection of skulls — which were collected by physician Josef Hyrtl to refute the idea of phrenology — examines medical racism. But some of those skulls also have their original descriptions, which use “idiot” and “cretin” (diagnostic terms at the time). Some have no information about the person whatsoever.
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Supporters of Polasky’s petition aren’t opposed to change: They believe that remains procured through subterfuge should be taken off display. They think that if someone’s descendants want to reclaim their ancestor, they should. But they do not think the default should be to take down displays that contain bodies or parts acquired before our modern notion of consent.
“What’s better: for them to be entirely forgotten and to suffer a second death,” Polasky says, “or for them to be loved and cared about and taught with in a respectful way?”
The former is better, says Aparna Nair, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough who studies disability and colonialism. She believes the Mütter’s fans are prioritizing their curiosity over respect for the dead, and justifying the plunder because it might serve an academic purpose.
“It seems almost neocolonial,” Nair says, “because that’s exactly the justification that White European colonizers had for stealing bodies: that it was necessary for research, for education.”
For those who had physical disabilities, she adds: “Being stared at was a significant part of their lives. In any case, what makes us have the arrogance to imagine that that would be their wish in perpetuity?”
Spectacle is in the eye of the beholder. While some members of the disability community see the Mütter as an offensive freak show, others see it as a place where people can learn about their rare conditions. One Mütter supporter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her medical privacy, told The Post about the first time she visited the museum and saw a jar of skin flakes from a patient who had dermatillomania, a skin-picking disorder. She had her own collection at home, but never knew her condition had a name.
The museum is wildly popular and is regularly featured in stories about Philadelphia tourism, as well as features on “dark tourism,” a collection of creepy sites such as haunted houses and abandoned prisons. Sometimes, the Mütter will play to that audience: An exhibition last year focused on vampires, and its Halloween party is always a big hit.
Share this articleShareNevertheless, “it’s not one of those shock-value places,” Polasky says. It “speaks to a lot of people who feel very close to the dead — the people who want to work with the dead, the people who want to become doctors and also happen to be a little bit creepy, because we’re comfortable standing around human remains.”
People like pathology assistant Nicole Angemi. She hosted her wedding there.
“It felt like the best place for me to get married, because it’s so much a part of my life,” she says. If the Mütter were changed into a museum of “health and well-being” with no human remains, she would be devastated. “The place would be closed down in less than a year and nobody would go. ... People want to see the juicy stuff. That’s why they go there.”
Or people like the magician Teller, an avid fan of the museum.
“The Mütter as I know it is fearless, frightening, and frank,” he wrote in an email. “You come face to face with objects of tremendous power. Bones, brains, tumors. Castings of the bodies of people shockingly unlike — and disturbingly like — yourself. All so richly and beautifully displayed that they feel like works of art.” A watered-down Mütter “would not disturb, offend, or challenge. This would be a great loss. We don’t learn from being comfortable.”
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It’s also not the first time a Philadelphia museum has grappled with the literal skeletons in its closet. The Penn Museum — where Quinn worked as the director of exhibitions until 2020 — has its own collection of human remains from some 12,000 individuals, previously including children killed in a 1985 incident in which Philadelphia police bombed the headquarters of a Black liberation group. Those remains were returned to families in 2021, and the museum apologized.
“There’s sort of a different atmosphere in Philly right now,” says Katie Stringer Clary, an assistant professor at Coastal Carolina University who studies museum ethics and death. “Human remains are at the forefront of these conversations, specifically in that city,” in part because it’s the birthplace of American medicine, as the location of the country’s first medical school and one of its earliest hospitals.
And professional museum organizations offer little guidance. The American Alliance of Museums, whose accreditation the Mütter is seeking, states in its Code of Ethics for collections professionals that decisions about acquiring, storing and displaying human remains must be governed by living descendants and undefined “professional best practices.”
“There’s not a one size-fits-all solution,” Clary says. “I think you have to look at every single individual in a museum and make that exact call.”
So what’s actually happening at the Mütter? In an interview with The Post, Quinn, the museum director, and Irons, the CEO of the College of Physicians, says they haven’t made any major decisions yet.
“We are not planning to destroy or dismantle or take anything apart,” Quinn says. “We’re just looking to strengthen” the Mütter.
Right now, the review is focused on the YouTube videos: cataloguing which ones contain human remains, whether donors consented to appearing in videos and whether the videos are accurate, Quinn says. Approximately 100 videos have already been republished. The museum declined to share the names of the experts in the panel conducting the review. But for tricky cases, the final say will come from “the two of us, to start, but certainly some of our board members may be involved,” Quinn says. (The videos had already been “carefully researched,” says Chrissie Perella, a former archivist in the college’s Historical Medical Library. Vetted by multiple staff members before being published initially, they were created “not in a freak-show light but presented in an educational, respectful way.”)
“We have no plans to take anything down,” Quinn says. “In fact, what we’re looking to do is to engage the public coming in into some of these more difficult conversations about the collection.”
Quinn and Irons say they plan to host focus groups of people of color, people with disabilities and museum members. They also hope to institute a QR-code system that would allow visitors to give feedback in real time about whether they believe exhibitions are respectful and whether remains should be displayed.
As for the personal criticisms, Irons acknowledges that she did say that she finds certain parts of the museum intolerable, but she says that her remarks were taken out of context.
“I’ve devoted my life to treating children with rare genetic diseases,” Irons says. “It’s difficult for me to view certain exhibits, particularly some of the fetal exhibits that are presented without additional facts.”
Quinn acknowledged that she made inquiries about whether fetal exhibits should remain on display.
The parents who donated their children’s bodies gave “consent for research,” Quinn says. “But not consent for display.”
That’s not true, says maternal-fetal medicine specialist George Davis, a fellow of the College of Physicians who arranged for the postmortem donation of many of the infants. Davis noted that all donations he had facilitated were deeded to the college as “unrestricted gifts,” with the parents’ knowledge they would be displayed.
Quinn and Irons just hope to lower the temperature of the discourse to allow the review to take place.
“We owe it to the remains, we owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to the public,” Quinn says. “It’s just simply a review. Take a look, take pause and see where we are with that, and to ask questions about what makes sense in today’s world.”
One of those questions is about perception. She has been paying attention to negative reviews of the museum from people offended by the remains, but is wary of positive reviews from those who see it as “more of a dare to come in, and it’s more about the oddities,” Quinn says. “Is that what we want to continue to be known for?”
But she would like those folks — including the self-described goths — to know they are welcome to visit. “It’s just very silly to think that I would be targeting any specific community,” she says.
This is a solemn place, where the human condition is laid bare. When you imagine the pain of being a human with a 40-pound, fully loaded, terminally malfunctioning colon, or with a hornlike tumor protruding from the head, you feel new levels of compassion and gratitude. Staring at the eyelid crease on a bisected head, or the tiny, perfect hands of an infant born without a skull, can feel downright holy.
“People come because they hear it might be spooky,” says Perella, the former library archivist. “But then they get there, and they realize it’s really just about being human.”
And watching an afternoon’s worth of visitors — which, yes, included a few people dressed a bit gothy, but also medical professionals in scrubs — it was clear that most people circling around the tubercular abscesses or the plaster casts of famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng were not there for a sideshow.
“I can’t imagine how much her body was working to make that thing,” says a woman, gazing at a watermelon-size ovarian cyst.
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“Some cancers are more aggressive than others,” a father said to his young daughter and son, near a display case with some gnarly models of tumors. “It does not look very pretty, but that’s what happens.” The children nodded thoughtfully, in the sight line of the toothless skull of Geza Uirmeny, a European shepherd.
Eisenstein, the Mütter superfan, does not want to lose Geza, or Carol, or Mary, or any of the souls he has visited over many years of coming to the museum. He turned toward a nameless preserved face, suspended in liquid, and began to admire its eyelashes.
“Those soft curves,” Eisenstein says. “It feels like sculpture. It feels like something you’d see [from] Michelangelo. ... The most beautiful art that we can ever conceive of is not made by human beings, but by the human body.”
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