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By Doug, June 27, 2009 06:31

Conjoined Twins (or Two-Headed Child)

When Thomas Dent Mütter donated his collection to College of Physicians of Philadelphia, he didn’t intend it to be a freak show. Indeed, he wanted other physicians and students of medicine to see and learn from artifacts from people with strange diseases and deformities. And for many years that was its primary purpose. But today, it attracts tourists like a P. T. Barnum sideshow.

Some of the pieces in the collection include a plaster cast of Ying and Yang, the famous Siamese twins, from which the common name for conjoined twins came; the “soap lady” whose flesh turned into a soap-like substance; hundreds of skulls with various abnormalities; skeletons of “two headed people” (a type of conjoined twin); and a woman with a horn growing out of her forward. The museum also contains many old medical instruments that were likely very effective in “curing” people, once the patient saw them (“No, doctor, really. I feel MUCH better now!”). And, there are more normal exhibits from famous people like a cancerous growth removed from President Grover Cleveland.

Gretchen Worden is the woman “credited” with moving the museum from a place of medical science seen by a few hundred people a year in 1975 to more than 60,000 tourists a year when she died in 2004. No word on whether or not she became an exhibit herself!

The Mütter Museum

Related reading:

• Mutter Museum Historic Medical Photographs
• The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: A True Medical Mystery
• Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body
• Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit

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By Doug, June 14, 2009 10:29

Replica of the drill and pumping station at the Drake Oil Well museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania

Quick, where was the first oil well in the United States drilled? Texas? No. Alaska? Of course not! The first oil well in the United States was in Pennsylvania. The year was 1859 and a man named Edwin L. Drake drilled an oil well in Titusville Pennsylvania thus starting America’s oil industry.

The museum itself consists of the obligatory gift shop, a replica oil derrick and pumping station and a rock placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution commemorating the historic event that happened some 50 years earlier. Nowadays, since the well is dry, the pump just cycles crude in and out of the original hole, which is still interesting to watch.

The museum also has some displays on oil from around the world and some ways we’re dependent on oil that may not be obvious to many. Back in the day, for example, we used oil to melt the raw material needed to make glass.

Too bad they can’t find a little more crude in that well; we could use it!