New leaders at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum explain their vision for the historic medical science collection

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​​Science historians Sara Ray and Erin McLeary both have long histories with the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia’s famous medical history museum that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. Now they are in charge as senior directors, after the departure of former Executive Director Kate Quinn in April.

In the late 1990s, McLeary interned at the museum under Gretchen Worden, the director who turned the museum into a renowned tourist destination, including going on “Late Night with David Letterman.” McLeary later wrote a doctoral dissertation on the history of medical museums in the U.S. and how people became specimens in those institutions.

Ray saw a child mummy in a glass case at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, and had a lot of questions about how that became an object in a museum. She started a doctoral program in history of science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, and “my first stop was to walk across the bridge, walk into the Mütter and ask how to become a volunteer docent.”

Ray and McLeary are taking charge of the museum after two tumultuous years: Quinn sparked controversy when she was still executive director by suddenly removing all online exhibits and videos in the name of an ethical review; a relatively new CEO resigned just a little more than two years into her tenure; and a few living donors became so upset they asked for their donations back.

Dr. Larry Kaiser, now CEO of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which runs the museum, said in an earlier interview that Ray and McLeary are both “incredibly talented” and “have great ideas as to how we can continue to provide the context of education that many of these exhibits really do require.”

Ray said that ever since she started giving tours of the museum as a volunteer in 2014, her favorite thing to do is listen to what people are talking about as they go through the exhibits. She said people are often struck by how they can look at a body part that’s not usually visible, like a brain or a heart, and how bodies can look different than their own.

“The thing that I always say to people is that having a body is the only thing that all humans, past and present, across geographies, cross cultures, it’s the only thing that we all have in common,” Ray said. “The level of anatomical diversity that you see in the museum is not because the past was some … uniquely … mysterious time where people were just walking around in bodies that seemed completely unfathomable to us. That level of bodily variation still exists. It’s just that medicine has changed.”

For instance, Ray pointed to a wax model of a woman with a growth out of her forehead that looks like a horn, and said that this condition is not uncommon, it’s just that now people will get such growths removed, so the museum shows how medicine has changed over time.

The Mütter has long had the tagline “disturbingly informative.” Ray said that some people may come to the museum out of macabre fascination, but that never sat right with her.

“No one was collecting these things in the 18th century and the early 19th century just because they were sort of … titillating in the way that … maybe people think about it now,” she said.

She said that while it’s natural to look at the exhibits and think about death, she saw it more as a story about how factors like social circumstances, medicine at the time and family structure leave imprints on our bodies

“You can engage with this space as a very fascinating flip book of life and the ways that life inscribes itself on the human body,” Ray said.

McLeary added that one role the museum can play today is to teach people “historical empathy.”

“By empathy, I don’t mean like, ‘Oh, I’m looking at this body that’s very distinctively different from me and feeling sorry for that person,’” McLeary said. “I mean, the ability to place yourself in a different space, a different time, a different lived experience to really understand the ways in which people have lived their lives in different historical periods.”

One way to do that is by presenting a more complete picture of a person’s life story, using other materials in their collection. She pointed out that out of almost 500,000 objects in the museum and library, only around 6,600 are human remains, and she and Ray are excited to use the rest of the collection in new ways.

She explained that there is a long tradition in medical settings to anonymize specimens, but she hopes to do the opposite, to add more context. Last year, she and her team found that they were able to learn more about the people who became specimens through historic archives, death certificates and patient reports.

For example, she said there’s a specimen of a child who died when he was 7 years old, and they were able to find his full family history, including his brother’s report card from 1891.

“This research has been really … deeply gratifying to our team … to move from the specimen that represents their death, to be able to locate them, to affiliate them with information that can bring their lived experience to life,” McLeary said.

Kimberlee Moran, a forensic archaeologist at Rutgers University, said that looking at the people behind the specimens is a “noble cause,” but that medical researchers anonymize patient records in the interest of privacy, so the Mütter would have to consider how to balance patient privacy with the goal of telling a fuller picture of a person’s life.

Moran was part of a group of researchers who worked to document, identify and ultimately rebury people who were inadvertently unearthed in a construction project in Old City. As an example of the issues involved, she said that people on their project had long discussions about how to handle the data, and worked with descendant communities. She said many descendants reached out and offered DNA samples for analysis to find more family members. The researchers ultimately did not get funding to do any DNA analyses, but they discussed the issue, and decided against connecting any DNA analyses to publicly accessible databases, even though it could have helped people identify more family members.

For now, the Mütter Museum researchers are studying the lives of the people behind the specimens as a pilot program to see how well their research methods work.

Later in August or September, they will present their work as part of the museum’s Postmortem Project, to ask for feedback on how they should handle human remains in their collection.