After two new leaders of the Museum were named, they spoke with WHYY about their vision for the Mütter. Part of the article is provided below and can be fully accessed .
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.”