Pivoting to Wellness

Exploring the Boundaries of Morbidity and Education

On a hot afternoon in Philadelphia, when Hillary Clinton’s scheduled presidential campaign rally put a halt to our attempt to run up the Rocky steps, I suggested to my friend that we go to the other place: the Mütter, a museum of medical history at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. I believe that a part of him has hated me ever since. He didn’t want to see the megacolon, a nine-foot-long diseased organ belonging to a man who had performed as the Human Balloon in a sideshow attraction before dying of chronic constipation at the age of 29, filled with 40lbs of shit. Nor did he want to see the Soap Lady, the remains of a woman who died in the 18th century and whose fatty tissue turned to a waxy, soap-like substance in the ground before she was exhumed nearly 100 years later, her mouth gaping in a silent, haunting scream. It was just not his bag. He wanted to leave. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to get a cheesesteak, despite everything.

The Mütter Museum is not for everyone, but it is for me and thousands of others – it gets more than 130,000 visitors per year. Currently, like everything in 2023, it is under threat. For the last six months, the museum’s new leaders – College president and CEO Mira Irons and Mütter executive director Kate Quinn – have been making efforts to revamp the 160-year-old museum. So far, it's been revamp by destruction: the removal of YouTube videos, the cancellation of programs, and opaque plans to focus on “health and well-being” rather than illness and death.