A Virtual Tour of the Mütter Museum

[Music] hi and welcome to your tour of the muder museum now really quickly before we can talk about the Moody Museum a brief history about the College of Physicians now the Moody Museum is part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia we're not a degree granting institution were a society of professionals mainly physicians we started in 1787 and we're still going strong today now the muder museum came about because in 1858 this handsome gentleman right here dr. Thomas Denton looter unfortunately found himself in poor health he was a fellow here at the college and decided to bequeath his entire teaching collection to us now he did have a few stipulations one of which was that we had to build a fireproof building to house this collection which we did and that opened in 1863 unfortunately dr. mooder passed in 1859 but his desire that his collection live on as a teaching collection still holds and we've amassed more collections over the years and the intent and the use of it has just always been the same as it was over 150 years ago and that's education the only thing that's changed is our demographic if you had come here 40 50 years ago almost everybody here would be medical students or physicians today the vast vast majority of our visitors have no medical background whatsoever and we love that so as I guide you through this collection today keep in mind that we were educating physicians 150 years ago and we're educating the public today [Music] behind me you can see the hurdle skull collection it's 139 skulls collected by dr. Joseph hurdle in the mid 19th century now we acquired this collection over a 150 years ago and it's been one of our most iconic exhibits in fact I think it's been on display almost the entire time we've been open now the collection aside from being very visually interesting is also very anthropologically and medically interesting because this is what we call a known population now what do I mean by known population well it means if you look at some of our labels you can see that in many cases we know a lot of the information about the individual so we might even know their name their age where they were from and how they died and for anthropologists this is very important information because that helps us know more about other unknown populations so the more we know about certain things the better it is for us to learn more about the unknown now another interesting thing about this collection is that you can actually visit all of it virtually we scanned every single one of these skulls and they're available on something called the open research scan archive so scholars from all over the world can access these images for free now the collection here was again like I said collected by dr. Joseph hurdle and there's an interesting story as to why he collected them in the mid 19th century there was a scientific belief called phrenology and it basically stated that you could tell a person's intelligence or moral character by certain physical characteristics of the skull measurements landmarks things like that but doctor hurdle did not believe in that so he wanted to systematically debunk phrenology as a science so that's why the hurdle skull collection was created and he was fairly successful in his arguments so much so that he was forcibly retired from his position at the University of Vienna and ultimately his collection came to us now you may notice that there's a bit of an empty spot behind me and that's because we have a researcher doing some work with some of the skulls behind the scenes in our lab now this exhibit is one of our more recent permanent exhibitions at the college and at the motor museum it's entitled our finest clothing a layered history of our human skin so we talked a little bit about what skin is and then we also talked about all the different things that we can do to our skin all of our body modifications piercings and tattoos and of course we have to talk about what can go wrong as well now what's really interesting about this exhibition is it has not one but two specimens from living donors and in fact one of those specimens is from our former Museum director dr. Robert Hicks he had a skin cancer procedure and he donated his slides we actually have an informal friends and family plan so if you work here if you're one of our friends and any bit or piece of you happens to fall off be removed we don't have too many questions but we would like to have it we also have a jar of picked human skin so modern donations historical donations we have it all now many times when people come into the museum we try to give a basic understanding of the types of collections that we have for instance we'll say if you see a specimen in a jar with fluid it's a wet specimen but if you see an object in a jar with no fluid it's most likely one of our amazing wax models now why do we have wax models when we have these real biological specimens well that is all because of Education when you put a biological specimen in a jar of fluid in many cases you lose color and texture and when you are a dermatologist and you need to make a diagnosis you need to know those things these wax models were actually modeled off of people and body parts that had these conditions so they're incredibly accurate for color and for texture one of our most famous wax models is actually this individual right here Madame de ma of the widow sundae and she has a little something growing out of her as you can see again this is a wax model but it was based upon a woman who lived in France and what she has is something called a cornea cutaneous sometimes known as a human horn but it is not a horn it is actually hyper growth of the keratin asia's layer of your skin and when we mean by that is the layer of the skin that's responsible for forming nails hair things like that this still occurs today and in fact while this is a wax model of Madame dommage right next to her is an actual core new titanium removed from a human here we have the soap lady now she's called the soap lady because interestingly enough she does not represent any genetic or pathological condition she is actually the result of something called a taphonomic event and that means she looks the way she does because of something that happened to her after she died now in certain very rare circumstances when a body goes into the ground and under very specific conditions the body fat on that person turns into this waxy tallowy soapy like substance called a de Pasir generally you need an anaerobic environment meaning there's no oxygen and usually a basic pH of the soil and it helps to have a fairly moist or waterlogged environment but it's not always necessary but under those specific conditions a chemical process will occur and the body fat will turn into this atomosphere and what that adipose ear does is really interesting one it forms this protective barrier but to and I think this might be one of the more important things is well insects don't like the way a de paseo tastes and insects are really important in that decomposition process so that's why the soap lady is so relatively intact now what's really interesting too is we're not taking any extra-special environmental controls with her she's not in a refrigerated case she is basically for lack of a better term shelf-stable the soap lady has a really interesting story one of our fellows dr. Joseph lady got word that there were being bodies relocated from a cemetery they were making improvements for the upcoming Santana in Philadelphia and two of those bodies were these out of a seared bodies and one was a soap lady and the other was the soap man who's now at the Smithsonian now lady made some specific arrangements to have the bodies brought to him and he donated the soap lady to us and she's been with us ever since some of the things that people say about her is that she's screaming and that's not true now remember how I said that she is preserved but she's not perfectly preserved so her jaw is dropped open because of the natural decomposition process nothing more than that another really interesting thing we found out about her though is again if you look at her mouth you can see that she's what we call a dentist not a tooth in her mouth so when she was brought to us we were told that she was old but actually what happened was we did x-rays of her body you can see some of the x-rays here and that's what we found out that in fact she's not very old at all in fact she's pretty young maybe in her 30s maybe even younger so why did she lose all her teeth well dental hygiene was a very great back then but there could be other reasons as well and so we're actually conducting some scientific tests to see if we can find out a little bit more about her but we have to be very careful about it because her body is very delicate and we don't want to cause any harm to it so we have to make sure that we're balancing the preservation of her along with our scientific inquiries now behind me is the world's largest human colon on display at least to our knowledge if you know of one bigger please let me know this one is eight feet four inches long it measures about a foot and a half at its widest diameter and at the time of death it held about 40 pounds of fecal material now today it's known as congenital a ganglionic mega colon or Hirschsprung's disease this colon came from an individual who died at the age of 29 however according to his mother and his doctors he started exhibiting symptoms at 18 months and in fact towards the end of his life he was only recording one bowel movement a month now why is that well it's a congenital condition meaning it happens when you're forming in utero and we have something called the elementary canal and that's literally a innervated tube that goes from our mouth to our anus and that entire tube has nerves that cause peristalsis and that makes everything move along to its natural conclusion but what happens sometimes as in the case with Hirschsprung's disease is that the nerves fail to fully form around one or more sections of the colon or large intestine fecal material builds up because the nerves aren't properly moving things along and causing a proper bowel movement unfortunately the purpose of the large intestine is to both hold fecal material and to draw out water so the longer it's in there the drier and more compact it becomes and the harder it is to expel the colon over time slowly starts to get bigger and bigger it gets more distended the good news is today it's fairly easily treatable with something called about end-to-end anastomosis now kids are diagnosed sometimes just days after birth they can address this they can go in and actually cut away the bad unabated parts of your colon so the good parts together and then you're good to go literally [Music] have you ever wondered where the term Siamese twins comes from well it comes from these two gentlemen right here Chang and Eng bunker who were born in Siam which is now Thailand however we no longer use that term we use the term conjoined twins now now many people know of Chang and Eng bunker they were extremely popular both in the 19th century and even today and what most people know about them is that they toured with circuses and sideshows they even worked for a time for the famous or infamous PT Barnum but what a lot of people don't know about Chang and Eng is they did eventually retire from this profession they bought adjoining farms in mannery North Carolina they married sisters and they had 21 children between them now another thing that's interesting is they didn't always get along just because you happen to be attached to your sibling doesn't mean you are the same person they had lots of different interests and very distinct personalities so Chang liked certain beverages but Eng liked to stay up late at night and play poker so they came up with a plan they would spend a couple days at one brother's house with that brothers family and a couple days of the other brothers house but that brother's family and who's ever house they were at that's who got to call the shots and it worked out pretty well for them however one day unfortunately Chang insisted on going to his house it was his turn but it was a dark and stormy January night and he caught a cold he caught something we're not entirely sure how Chang died he had suffered a stroke previous to this but we do know that Aang woke up the next day and unfortunately Chang did not wake up with him a doctor was summoned because they did have a plan that if one brother died before the other they would have have emergency separation surgery but remember this is the 19th century there were no four-wheel drive vehicles and the doctor did not make it in time and unfortunately died three hours later after the twins died their wives granted physicians permission to bring their bodies up here to the College of Physicians for an autopsy and it was here where we found out that the twins not only shared a blood supply which they knew previous to their death at this band but they also had conjoined livers and you can see their livers directly below the castes here now this is a death cast of the twins it was done after the autopsy as you can see but if you look really carefully at the head you can see little pieces of their hair still stuck in the plaster the brothers did have a stipulation that if they died together they were to stay together and you can see the physicians honored that request the incisions go up to the area where they are conjoined but they never cut them apart after the autopsy the bodies were returned to the sisters and they were buried in Mount Airy North Carolina now this case here really showcases the extremes the bell curve if you will of human growth from some of the tallest to not so tall this is our mooder American giant he stands seven feet six inches tall and is the second tallest skeleton on display in the world now he represents a pathological condition called pituitary gigantism so what does that mean there's two different ways you can be tall you can be genetically tall so for instance yaa Ming who is a basketball player he's also seven feet six inches tall but our gentlemen here would not have been a very good basketball player because he's pathologically tall pituitary gigantism basically means his pituitary gland failed to shut off at the time it should've and this results in the growth of your skeleton your muscles connective tissue but what it doesn't really result in is the growth of your internal organs to be proportionate so if you can imagine this gentleman here probably had the internal organs designed to keep a body around the size of this skeleton maybe doesn't work out very well very often people with pituitary gigantism die of some sort of heart or lung issue now pituitary gigantism aside from causing extreme growth also has very distinct physical characteristics that would differentiate them from somebody who let's say is genetically tall and those are the distended ribcage the skull is extremely robust and it's hard to tell with the skeleton but believe it or not the hands and feet are actually larger in proportion to the size of the body and the limbs the arms and the legs are also quite elongated now pituitary gigantism still exists to this day and the key is early intervention once you have reached an extreme height there's really not much doctors can do even today so early detection is the key and then what they have to do is basically shut down the pituitary gland and that can be done by either surgery medication or even radiation now on the opposite end of the growth spectrum we have Mary Ashbury Mary is a dwarf there are over 200 different types of dwarfism one of the most is achondroplasia and that's the type of dwarfism that Mary has now achondroplasia has some very specific visual characteristics as you can see in the skeleton obviously aside from being a shorter stature you can see that the limbs are curved and in Mary's case there was one particular element of her skeleton that unfortunately played a key role in her death and that is her pelvis because we know that Mary died trying to give birth and there's actually two things that were an issue with the pelvis one of course was the birth canal the opening was just not big enough but the other issue was the tilt of the pelvis unfortunately the tilt of the pelvis was just incompatible with a vaginal delivery today a female dwarf can give birth but it's almost always via cesarean section unfortunately that was not a viable option for Mary at the time so she did end up having a cesarean section but unfortunately she died three days later and if you can imagine undergoing a cesarean section in the nineteenth century this was during a time when there was no anesthesia and there was no understanding of antisepsis or germ theory so they did not wash the instruments they did not wash their hands that is why cesarean sections had an extremely high mortality rate at that point in time [Music] now here we have Harry E slack and Carol or Zell both of these individuals had a very very very rare condition called FOP fibre dysplasia ossificans progressiva FOP is what we consider an ultra rare disease and in fact there's only 900 cases diagnosed in the world now it's a genetic condition as well in which bone grows uncontrollably and it does two things it forms this almost extra skeleton around the already existing skeleton but another thing it does is it actually fuses the bones together so in life people with FOP are slowly frozen in place if you look at Harry and Carol you'll realize that unlike many of the other skeletons that we have in the museum there's no metal keeping their bones together that is because they were fused together already in life now FOP is an incurable condition as of right now but the good news is there are at least three drugs in clinical trials that we hope someday will provide treatment for this condition but unfortunately not available to Harry or to Carol now both of them decided to donate their bodies Harry passed away in 1973 and he want his body to be used to learn more about FOP he didn't specifically ask to come to the muder museum but in 1979 he did come here and what's interesting is that in the 1990s Carol or Zell who was a resident of the Ingalls house here in Philadelphia actually went to an FOP conference where Harry skeleton was on display so she actually got to meet Harry skeleton and it was there that she made the decision that when she died she wanted to specifically come here to the muder Museum now Carol passed away in February of 2018 and we honored her wishes it took us almost exactly a year but in February 28th of 2019 her body her skeleton specifically came here to the muder museum now Carol had a very specific condition she said if you're going to take my skeleton you have to also take I bling her jewelry so you can see here we have a little bit of a display of some of the over 160 pieces of her jewelry that we also acquired so carol was very very active in education she was really all about teaching people about FOP she spoke to medical schools she spoke to the public she had lots of experience advocating and educating the public and were really happy that were able to have Carol continuing that mission in death that she did in life [Music] here's our Einstein case and you'll notice that we actually have the lights out slight technical difficulties but I still want to mention it it's important to note that we don't have a large chunk of Einstein's brain we only have these slides here which were taken and done shortly after Einstein passed away and there's actually five boxes of these that were created but only two boxes are on display to the public and we have one of them now what's really interesting is that people have been arguing for years about what it was that made Einstein so intelligent and many people look to the brain to try and figure that out but there's a big difference between studying a living brain and studying a dead brain and an Einstein's case with looking at his brain after he died there's just very little that we can say definitively that would put his brain apart from any others one interesting thing is it actually was slightly underweight for a male of his size but another thing that people talked about was that maybe he had more glial cells or maybe he didn't have a Sylvian fissure all of these things are debatable the only thing we can really say with some degree of certainty is that when we looked at these slides we saw a lack of something called lip effusion and lip effusion is like this plaque II buildup so you know you can have the plaque buildup in your arteries in your heart you can also have that happen in your brain now for a person who was in their mid 70s when they passed away Einstein had remarkably little but again we don't know if that was any correlation to his intelligence or not it's just a interesting fact about his brain another thing that's interesting is that this is a relatively recent acquisition we got this case in 2011 and that's important because and we still are actively collecting we're not as able to collect as many things as we used to we're very very particular but we still actively collect in fact some of the things I'm very interested in collecting are some of the health aspects that affect us in the 20th and the 21st century so a lot of the specimens and objects that you see here are really reflective of 19th century public health and health issues but just know that we're still are we trying to collect specimens and objects that reflect our current understanding and current public health issues as well [Music] well we've reached the end of our tour not because we don't have more to talk about but because I was told we're out of time your support enables us to continue to maintain and preserve this amazing collection if you'd like to learn more about how to contribute please click on the links below in our description and until next time stay disturbingly informed and you may also notice that the light is out why is that well because after 16 years of working here I don't know where the switches

Channel: Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Views: 754,300

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Keywords: mutter museum, college of physicians, college of physicians of philadelphia, medical history, museum, medical oddities, medicine, virtual tour, anna dhody, soap lady, mutter giant, megacolon, chang and eng, hyrtl skulls, dwarf, wax model, dermotology, tattoos, liver, bones, skeletons, carol orzel, harry eastlack, einsteins brain, thomas dent mutter

Id: dqJ2fk29NZA

Length: 24min 45sec (1485 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020