Little house of medical horrors

The Mütter Museum reveals medicine as the gruesome and inexact art that it is.

By Robert Strauss

Apr 10, 2000 | There it was, staring at me out of a jar, the subject of one of the great presidential prevarications. No, it wasn't a Watergate smoking gun or even a Clintonian cigar. Just the cancerous growth taken out of Grover Cleveland's jawbone on July 1, 1893.

Back then, Cleveland had just been elected to his second, albeit nonconsecutive, term mostly because he wanted to make sure the country stayed on the gold standard. His vice president, Adlai Stevenson, was a silver man. So when doctors found Cleveland's cancer, they took him out on a yacht on Long Island Sound and told everyone he had a toothache -- just so Stevenson wouldn't seize power because of a medical emergency.

The ruse went undiscovered until 24 years later, when Dr. W.W. Keen, a Philadelphia doctor who had been on the surgical team, produced the tumor and told the dirty cancerous secret.

The jellied little Cleveland tumor is but one of a veritable midway of medical oddities and artifacts at the M|tter Museum,, a gothic little joint housed in the otherwise august American College of Physicians at a busy commercial corner in Center City Philadelphia.

With its walls of skulls and cabinets of distended fetuses -- not to mention the 3-foot-wide piece of colon and the 8-inch-long human horn taken off a 70-year-old woman -- the M|tter is what you might get if you crossbred C. Everett Koop with Charles Addams. Being squeamish, I'd always avoided the place like the plague but now as middle age set in, I decided it was time for a visit. Maybe growing old was compelling me to pay homage to the magic of medicine. Or maybe I just wanted to see bodies that looked worse than me.

Next Page: "Siamese" twins and pickled fetuses

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