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