The Eeewww Factor in Downtown Philadelphia

There are very few visual cues to what awaits a visitor in the entrance to the Mütter Museum, tucked into the College of Physicians of Philadelphia building in Center City. It's the kind of federal architecture that Philadelphia is rife with, stately and impenetrable. But that facade conceals a chamber of vivid horrors - or unrivaled delights, depending on one's tolerance for the human condition laid bare.

Long a touchstone for adults with gothic sensibilities, the Mütter is a legitimate family destination - we're talking science and medicine, after all - but its capacity to titillate is twined with a tendency to just plain freak people out, however old they are.

"It certainly begins innocently enough," said Russell Tamberelli, a football fan from Connecticut who had taken his 11-year-old son to the Mütter for a tour before his beloved Green Bay Packers took on the Eagles on a Sunday last month. His team would be pushed around by the Eagles later that day, but the game would not be nearly so gory as the hidden recesses of the Mütter.

Visitors cross the lobby to an outer area suited for measured and benevolent temporary exhibits like the current one, ending tomorrow, on the medical challenges of the Lewis and Clark expedition. But then comes the museum proper, where 20,000 artifacts of a medical nature are crammed in shelf after shelf. It is ancient - the museum was founded in 1849 - creepy and compelling by turns. There are bodies, skeletons, hundreds of fluid-preserved anatomical and pathological specimens and lots of hardware in the form of archaic medical instruments. It is as if the Addams Family had partnered with Dr. Frankenstein in coming up with thousands of their favorite things. Who, after all, can resist a human colon that outgrew its host and eventually killed him?...

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/12/3...es/30down.html

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It's worth the visit, IMHO!

Mark