Mutter

A wonderful day.  I'd been wanting to go to the Mutter ("moo-ta") Medical Museum for years, and finally did.
Aline and I got the 9:20 train to Philly and walked the easy three blocks to the museum.  It's housed in an elegant brick building with a lovely garden adjacent and what a find!
Here are human artifacts that include the tallest human skeleton on display in North America, the preserved body of the adipocere "Soap Lady," part of Albert Einstein's brain, and to my pleasure, "the plaster death cast of the torso of world-famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng and their conjoined livers."
I've always had an interest in twins (hmm...wonder why) and other multiple births, and I've read a lot about C. and E.  They emigrated to North Carolina, adopted the surname, "Bunker," operated a successful business, married sisters, had 21 children between them, and died within minutes of each other.  I understand many of their descendants are still living down south.
We saw an eight-foot colon, more than 3,000 swallowed objects removed from patients, malformed infants in formaldehyde, innumerable plaster casts of afflicted limbs, and preserved parts of practically every area of the human body.  There's an array of sliced tissue (mostly from brains), dyed slides showing various diseases, and all manner of other medical conditions, common and wildly unusual.
There's a permanent exhibit called "Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits" that depicts the horrors of the Civil War (and by inference, maybe, of all wars everywhere).  It includes writings, historic photographs, plaster casts, and the fearfully primitive medical equipment in use at the time.
We left to have lunch--mediocre--at a nearby Chinese restaurant, sat in the garden for a bit, then went back to continue our tour. After a fascinating day in perfect weather--well, it was very hot, but we managed to ignore that--we caught the 4:47 back to Absecon.  I dropped A. off and got home about 7:00 after another off-the-beaten-track adventure.  Great fun and it's wonderful to know that Philadelphia, with all its treasures, is so accessible to us.