August 13, 2023
The New York Times spoke with leadership from The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and The Mütter Museum regarding the past, present, and future of the Museum. Part of the article is provided below and can be fully accessed .
But museums that display human remains increasingly face public reckoning and scrutiny. Some museums have scrapped the term “mummy” to describe preserved corpses from ancient Egypt, deeming it dehumanizing. In 2021, Jo Anderson, a curator at Great North Museum in Newcastle, England, said, “A significant number of visitors question whether mummified people on display are real.”
“What was respectful 100 years ago, or even five years ago, may not be so today,” Dr. Irons said. At the Mütter, she said, the challenge is to make visitors see damaged body parts for what they really are — not objects or curiosities, but real humans who were once alive.
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“We’re actively moving away from any possible perception of spectacle, oddities or disrespect for the collections in our care.”
On arriving, Ms. Quinn was surprised to learn that the Mütter had no ethics policy, let alone a human-remains policy. What’s more, the museum had only fragmentary data about how many residents — as the staff refers to the human specimens — came to the Mütter or the circumstances of their lives. “We owe it to the remains to learn as much as we can about each individual who’s here,” Ms. Quinn said. “And yes, it matters to a lot of people.”