Skin deep: macabre Mütter Museum to open exhibit examining our largest organ

I’m standing in the storage closet at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, surrounded by wire shelves stocked with biological specimens. The room is kept at a relatively high humidity and regulated by an exhaust system that performs six air exchanges an hour to eliminate unpleasant odors. Although this closet is located above a boiler room, it’s cold and crisp, like a restaurant’s walk-in fridge.

In one cylindrical jar floats a cream-colored hand infected with cellulitis. The curve of the jar is distorting, so when I peer in from the side, the hand looks enormous.

The museum’s curator, Anna Dhody, explains that square containers are best for storage because you can see the specimens more clearly. This statement might be a metaphor for one of the goals of the Mütter Museum more generally: to strive to see things clearly – particularly things that some would prefer not to see.

Founded in 1858, the museum gathers together materials from the seventh century BC to the present that reflect the human history of anatomy and medicine.

The original collection was donated by Dr Thomas Dent Mütter to further research and education in a city known for its medical advancements. Most of the museum’s objects are medical instruments and human specimens: both “wet”, or biological specimens stored in fluid, and osteological, or skeletal, specimens.

Among the most beloved objects are the Hyrtl collection of 139 skulls; the giant colon of a man who appeared in a sideshow; a wax bust of Madame Dimanche, who had a nearly 10-inch cutaneous horn on her forehead; and the liver of conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker.

As a small museum with a large object-to-square foot ratio, the Mütter must make difficult choices about what to place on view. Because only 10%-15% of its collection is on display, the climate-controlled storage closet offers a glimpse into a hidden world of the macabre.

I’m here to see four new acquisitions that will be part of an exhibit about skin, scheduled to open this December. Like many objects in the museum’s collection, they are fragments of human bodies. They are also works of art.

They are tattoos.

These tattoos were found at the University of Pennsylvania during a purge of the pathology department’s storage spaces, and soon they will be officially gifted to the museum. The slightly discolored slivers of skin have been sewn to clear panels inside their jars to keep them taut. It is not yet known what the storage fluid might be, but the specimens are in excellent shape. They vary in size and design.

Dhody and museum educator Marcy Englemen are charged with filling in the histories of these mysterious objects. When did the University of Pennsylvania acquire them? What can be determined about the cadavers from which they were excised? Are the tattoos from the same time period? Each has a number associated with it, which may be traceable, if the correct database can be located. The containers in which they are stored will be dated, and the style and imagery of the tattoos will be researched.

Engleman, who teaches a class on body modification at the museum, is interested in the “universality” of tattooing. But she also notes that tattoos reveal personal identity and individuality; they each have a story. They are thus well suited to an exhibit that will engage not only medical concerns – “the ‘ology’ part of dermatology”, as Dhody terms it – but also wider cultural understandings of what skin reveals.

“It’s our largest organ, and it’s what we present to another person,” Dhody says.

The tattoos also resonate with other objects in the permanent collection, including a book bound in human skin and two jars of human skin, one of which is on display in the galleries.

These jars were donated by a woman with dermatillomania, or compulsive picking of the skin. This object affects visitors more than almost any other, and the museum hopes it will be a tool for education. Although the exhibit is still a work in progress, it will also likely include skin cancer slides, dermatological wax models and stereographs of dermatological conditions such as syphilis and ringworm. Madame Dimanche will be in attendance, as well.