For Your Bucket List

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Speaking of colons, that reminds me of an interesting place to visit ~ the Mutter Museum. The Mutter Museum is in Philadelphia and houses a collection of all sorts of medical specimens and oddities displayed in beautiful wooden cabinets ~ a 2 floor cabinet of curiosities! In addition to the soap lady, specimen jars of conjoined twins, and a plaster cast of Chang and Eng's attached livers, the Mutter owns the World's Largest Colon! (pictured above). If you look carefully you can see a photograph of the man whose colon this was ~ unfortunately I was not blogging at the time of my visit so this is the only photo I could locate.

My favorite display was the Chevalier Jackson Collection of objects swallowed and removed. There are over 2,000 objects displayed in a labelled wooden flat file ~ all removed without surgery!

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Amidst the coins, safety pins, small toys, dental plates and bones, there were an awful lot of Sunday school pins. My boyfriend and I had gotten the itch to visit the Mutter after visiting the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, MO, on one of our first dates. At the Glore, we were entranced by a display of over 1,446 metal objects one woman had swallowed, thus prompting our guide to suggest a visit to the Mutter. Roadside America has interesting reviews on both the Mutter and the Glore Museums ~ make sure to read before you visit!

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One more thing, at the time of each of my visits, I was disappointed with the selection in the gift stores ~ I felt that both places really missed opportunity to cash in on their collections. As my brother is a psychiatrist, my initial reason for stopping in at the Glore was to see if I could find a humorous gift for him.  In the past, the Glore gift store had sold actual patient art, but now it is art made from kits, not nearly as interesting. As for the Mutter, why not sell a "Soap Woman on a Rope" or a "World's Largest Colon" keychain ~ who wouldn't want such a keepsake?! 

Make sure to add these two museums to your bucket list ~ you won't be disappointed and I doubt you will see anything like it anywhere else!

While doing this post, I have found that this book is now available in the Mutter Museum shop.