Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Mutter Museum

Episode Date: July 20, 2017

Philadelphia is home not only to the most recent Sawbones live show, but also one of the world's most unusual museums -- The Mutter Museum -- a collection of medical oddities and anatomical specimens. But this is no freak show, this is an unflinching, educational look at the disturbingly beautiful and beautifully disturbing side of medicine. This is the Sawbones promised land. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Sad things is a show about medical history and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion It's for fun Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it just sit back relax and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth You're worth it. Alright, time for some mobs to mooks. One, two, one, two, a day for our kids. Hello everybody and welcome to Saw Bones Emerald Tour of Miscite Adguided medicine. I'm your co-host Justin Tyler McElroy. And I'm Sydney Smirl McElroy.

It's not even, it's not even, a lot of people on social media talk about, that's not even funny anymore. I've seen a lot of hashtags about how that's not really nice anymore, Nair break it set. From different, from different people, but I'm more concerned about the inevitable backlash, and I don't want my wife to get caught up in that. So anyway, hello, Phil and Elfia. How are you? We've never done a live show in Philadelphia before.

That's true. I went to Philadelphia once with my family. And why is that funny? It's not that funny. It's just a lot of history there. It's a lovely area. But as we're walking back to the car, a man ran up to us. And he seemed to be someone who

is going to want some money from us. And then when he ran up to us, he said, I do something the whole family can enjoy. Backflips. So you imagine, okay, two things, yeah. And also, we did. We did, yeah. My entire family enjoyed the backflips and he was was compensated duly for his back flipping prowess. Are you just asking like, do you know that guy? It was up the next slide.

So if anybody here is the back flip guy, anyway. We almost didn't make it. Yeah, it was tight. We are flicking. Our flight got canceled. Yeah. And we live somewhere very small. And it's not easy to get.

It's not like there are lots of other flights. But we just put everybody in our car and decided that we would drive to Philadelphia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It was a bad idea at the time. But now we are here enjoying your fair city. Well, it was worth it. We've had a wonderful time. It's been lovely. We went to the Reading Terminal market over there. We didn't wait in line for the donuts. We thought about it. This is a really long line. We have to talk. We have a talk line. No. But everything was good.

But we did go to, what was the name of it? Did I forget? Oh, I know why you're asking me. Yeah, because I'm sorry. You're not sure how to pronounce it. Well, you do yours. So we also went to the Mooter Museum. Or, or mutter museum.

She prefer. That was actually the first question that I asked. It was, they were nice enough at the museum to send us some emails ahead of time inviting us to come. They even were going to let us come in a little early, but because we ended up driving here and getting in so late, we didn't get to swing that. But we got set up with Jillian Lathley, who I have to give a shout out to, because she is the media and marketing manager, and she met us there and gave me like a little personal tour

and showed us some stuff. And my first question was, Jillian, how do I pronounce the name of your museum? Because I'm going to do a show about it, and I don't know. And she said, well, either way is fine. Which isn't, but it's not helpful now. But she, I didn't know this. So the guy that it's named for, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about him, Dr. originally mutter. When he was born and raised, he grew up Dr. Mutter. And then he went to Europe to study surgery and medicine for a year.

And he thought, you know, what would be fancier than mutter? LAUGHTER Mooter. So he came back, Dr. Mooter. So he just added the umlot. I mean, really, he just thought, like, that looks good.

I like that there. So there you go, either way. I'm going to put an umlot somewhere in my name and just see what happens. Juston? Just so, just so everybody's always wrong. I just want that, actually. Thank you so much for having me here, Mr. President,

to the White House, but it's that probably wouldn't happen. No. I can't. I can't talk to you. We talked to you, A. I'm talking about the story. It's a story show. I was a little worried when we decided to do the museum,

because normally I have to feign ignorance of medicine to make our show work. And I was worried that that would not be the case, but we brought our daughter, Charlie, with us. And she enabled me to have sort of a parallel experience to the actual visiting of the museum. So throughout Sydney's presentation, she got like five skulls in.

Before she's actually, I'm two. So I'm gonna go. If anybody wants to come with me, that would probably be legally advisable. So I'm just gonna be able to throw in some cool insights about the gift shop and there's a garden outside. So either one of those, all if I have any sort of fun observations

that connect what Cindy's talking about, about the gift shop or the gardens. I don't know why. I really thought she'd be into it. I don't have a good sense for those things. There's a little thing that you stand in, which is the last thing we did, which is like a virtual gift your arm shot off in the Civil War,

which, okay, you're laughing now, shame on me, right? Okay. But I thought, in my dad brain, I'm like, ooh, interactive. You should enjoy this. Charlie came and told me about it, and she said, daddy got his arm shot off, and I yelled for you and you weren't there.

And as we left about 20 seconds in, He got his arm shot off, and I yelled for you, and you weren't there. And as we left about 20 seconds in, daddy never, ever, ever, ever, ever get your arm shot off in the Civil War. Fine. So first of all, as I already mentioned, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Mooter, for whom the museum is named, and was the originator of the collection. So he's born in 1811, he was orphaned

and raised by some distant relatives. And like I said, he got his MD at Penn, and then he went abroad, because at the time medical education in the States was not a thing, really, I mean, it was sort of a thing, but you didn't have to have any sort of education to be a doctor. You could just decide one day, I feel like a doctor today.

I'm going to say I am. I'm going to put up a sign and people can figure it out the hard way. So he didn't like that. He wanted to learn in Europe where at the time, there were actually like standards and you had to go through certain You know classes to be a doctor So we went and he studied and he came back and so he had a lot of Knowledge that not necessarily every physician would have had at the time and he came to work in Philadelphia

and you've got to understand at this point in the US the like the state of medicine and disease I mean it was a bad scene. People didn't understand germ theory of disease, so sanitation was not really a concept for most people. Like, why would we care if things were clean? We don't need to wash our hands. What is this?

Why would it matter? And diseases specifically in Philadelphia that were running rampant were things like cholera, smallpox, dysentery, yellow fever, scarlet fever, malaria, typhus, TB. J-listen. Gravaging the city. I- Daily.

Y'all nasty. For real. You guys are kind of nasty as he's like, what are y'all doing? It was a rough time. But he was very talented from the jump. He learned a lot, he studied really hard, he had good hands, he was a surgeon, he was actually ambidextrous, so he had, he was really good at surgery.

And he was known mostly though for how personable he was. He was supposedly very charming. His colleagues loved him. His students loved him. His patients loved him. All of his colleagues' wives loved him because his suits matched his carriages. He was very fancy.

He was a very well-to-do guy. He was very proud. But his patients would attest that he had a great bedside manner and he really took a lot of time to connect with his patients and treat them as people and not as diseases long before patch atoms. You know you came up with that. You beat me to it! I was so close! Oh, I knew it. I knew you were going there. You know what? I'm gonna get this one in post. You know said you were going there. You know what, I'm going to get this one in post.

You know said, you treat the patient. Never mind. Never mind. It's the moment's pass. It's fine. Part of what he was specifically interested in were plastic surgeries. Especially procedures that other surgeons at the time just said, I don't even know why you would do that. You know, this person, yes, maybe they have been, especially fire and burn injuries, were a big problem at this time.

A lot for women because they would work in kitchens that were not in any way kept safe. And so burn injuries in kitchens were a big problem. So people would come to him and say, I'm alive, I'm functioning, but I've been disfigured by this accident. And I would like you to help me. And a lot of surgeons would just say,

no, what's the point? We don't need to do that. And at the time, that could be the rest of your life, especially for women who didn't have a lot of opportunities if you weren't considered mariable, then that was it. And so doing these surgeries was actually a big deal from a social perspective, from a medical perspective, even though it wasn't recognized at the time,

and he was willing to do them. And he was a pioneer of a lot of techniques that we would learn and obviously get better over time, like flap surgeries where we could connect a piece of skin that was still connected somewhere and kind of pull it over and connect it somewhere else and grow new skin there. And all kinds of things, and he would operate on people

that at the time medically would have been called monsters. That was a medical term. If you can believe that, that would have been like your diagnosis, well, you have. You're a monster. You have monster. And he gave them hope and did these procedures. So he was very well-liked, and he was very well liked and he was very popular

and he was very successful. And as part of his learning about different disfiguring conditions and accidents and traumas, he started collecting a lot of unusual specimens. He had his own personal interest in it, but he also thought this was really helpful for teaching. If I can show you what this looked like before, or if I can find something that I've never operated on before

and get a specimen, then I can learn techniques, kind of figure out how to handle it if I ever see it. So he began amassing this giant collection of what people tended to think of as kind of medical oddities. I have to imagine, like, if you get one of those, you pretty much only have the option to make a museum, right? Like, you look out on the shelf like, well, that's weird. It's just a brain and a jar.

There's certainly going to arrest me for that. But if I have 50 brains in a char, suddenly I've got a museum. So he put together this huge collection, and he decided this needs to be housed somewhere. I don't want to run this by myself. But I want it to be accessible to students and doctors of the future. So he went to the College of Physicians,

the Philadelphia College of Physicians, which was and is a very prestigious organization, again, of physicians who said you actually have to know something standardized to be a doctor. Let's all agree on that. It was founded by Benjamin Rush, among others, who I know in the past, I have thrown a little shade at Benjamin Rush to be fair.

Wait, the first thing we looked at on our tour was a portrait of Benjamin Rush, and Jillian, our guide, was sort of talking to us about him sitting there. We're both looking a little uncomfortable. You see somebody apart, you've been talking trash about, like, oh, man, this is awkward. Yeah.

It's hard. It's that time in history where there's a lot of, like especially, like, rich white doctor guys who you can say some really great stuff about. But then there's always a, but also. And Benjamin Rosh is a good example that, and man, I've learned, you gotta be careful,

do not insult him in front of a psychiatrist. I've learned that the hard way. So I don't do that. But anyway, he was responsible for this college of physicians, which is a very prestigious organization, and they were chosen by Dr. Mooter to house this collection as long as there's a stipulation. He said, I'll give you, at the time he had 1700 objects,

he gave them $30,000, and he said, all you gotta do is you gotta have a fireproof building to put it in, it's reasonable. Get a curator, and I'd like you to hold regular like lectures and seminars and things to continue to teach people about it and keep adding to the collection over time. And so it happened. And there you go. We have the Mooter Museum. Thank goodness. And how relaxing his garage must have been after that. Because it was just getting a little silly in there. It's really good. I'm gonna do some painting. You know what? Jill, I

decided, now I have, I'm gonna do the pottery. I know I've been saying I'm gonna take up pottery. We finally have this room in here. I'm gonna do this. All the brains are out. Let's do it. The medicines, the medicines, that I skill at God, before the mouth. It's really interesting to think, you know, he actually, he died fairly young and part of the reason that it was always always have to go to where somebody died. Just finishing. Every no story on solbona can be like,

and he worked for a long time after that and seemed to be pretty good. It's that, like you never get, it's always like, and the princess and the prince were rode off into the sunset, and later they died. Anyway. Because all people do, and the train horn for us to recognize. Okay.

How's your festival going? Pretty good, it seems like. I just mentioned that because the Latin root I believe. I think what I'm trying to create a context here. What I'm trying to say is that part of why it's really easy to look at the museum and like what I had heard about it before I actually went and experienced it is that oh it's a bunch of weird medical stuff. Which, yes, of course, that stuff is there. But it's more than that.

And part of why he was so connected to his patients and why he was thought to care so much, truly care about his patients, is that he suffered his entire life from gout and probably maybe tuberculosis as well. It's not entirely clear. But he was a patient, too. He was sick and in pain most of his life, it's not entirely clear. But he was a patient too. He was sick and in pain most of his life. He died young from it. And so he understood what it was like

to constantly face the challenge of chronic disease, which connected him more to his patients and also was part of what motivated him to say. Let's learn from this, let's respect this and let's create this collection so that we can learn more and pass it along, which is really what the museum is all about, not just come look at some weird stuff. I mean, he rescued a lot of artifacts from side shows and freak shows and things like that, so

that was my point. That's my context. Okay, and then you have lip balm in there that looks like skulls. So if you want to go that route, that's available to you. And also, okay, they have a brain that is filled with liquid. And I got one for Charlie because she really wanted it. And then we went back to our Airbnb. And if you have a two-year-old, you probably already see where this story is going. She, I guess, not a hole in it because we came into the bedroom

that we have there and there's just brain goop everywhere on the floor and the walls. All the way up the wall. And then like dexter there in the middle just chewing on a brain. It's like, it's not, and in my head, I'm going through this like mental inventory of like, what is in that? Because my day's about to go one of many different directions, depending on the substance within the brain. I don't know what it was. No, we got it all clean.

We got it all clean. We got it all clean. Everything she's fine. No one was injured. We know where I was. They're not going to sue us at the Airbnb. It's fine. But don't buy the brain if you put the top. Yeah, I don't want to watch it better than we do, I guess.

So some of the exhibits that Justin didn't get to see, I wanted to talk about. Actually, the first one you did get to see, the soap lady. Yeah, the soap lady. Yeah, the soap lady. She here? That's rough. She'll make it. So she is called the soap lady.

It is a woman whose body was exhumed in Philadelphia in 1875. And because of the conditions in which this body was buried, specifically, it was a warm, airless, alkaline environment. That's what you need for this process to happen. Something called adiposeer can form out of the fatty tissues in the subcutaneous tissues in our body. And it preserves the body in a very unique way. It's sort of like soap.

I mean, it's basically soap is what happens. The body is kind of made of different kinds of soap. And so you don't see the decomposition over time that you would assume you would see. I mean, by now we'd expect this body to be skeleton, and it's not. And right now, did you say Skellington?

No, it sounded like it said Skellington, I got pretty excited. And I'm not just trying to rail you because I'm getting yuck to the max. But she's still preserved exactly like that, and she's like at room temperature now. You don't have to do anything. She's in the glass box, you can look at her, and she's at room temperature, and she's just like that, and she's largely at room temperature now. You don't have to do anything. She's in the glass box. You can look at her.

And she's at room temperature. And she's just like that. And she's largely made out of soap, sort of. I mean, not like your soap. I like the soap you use. Don't worry. Don't use this as soap. Although they do sell little soap lady soaps.

Oh, and I'm the bad guy. There's a couple things that are really interesting And I'm the bad guy. I can guess one. Made of soap. One, from a very practical standpoint, she's been used. And that's the neat thing about a lot of the stuff in the museum is that they can continue to use, because they're such old artifacts and they're well preserved, they can use them for some current medical research. For instance, every time a new imaging modality,

you know, in time of X-rays and CAT scans and MRIs, every time something new comes along, they try it out on the soap lady to see, you know, like, what, how does this do? What can we see and how does it work? And they lady to see, you know, like what, what, how does, what does this do? What can we see and how does it work? And they've learned a lot about her, like they had her the year of death completely wrong They used to think like she died in the yellow fever epidemic in the 1790s But then they found these buttons on her clothes using imaging techniques that showed she would have lived much later than that And it also helps us learn how to use this new technology

and what we can do with it and that kind of stuff. So she has a very practical application, a gift she continues to give to medical knowledge. The other interesting part is probably not as useful is that Jillian sent me a list ahead of time of the three most popular fainting spots in the museum. And she is number one on the list.

She's also like the first thing you encounter. So I guess that's good, because if you're gonna pass out, let's just get it out of the way. And maybe then you know, like, maybe I should go as her refund and just leave. Maybe I can't handle this. But they used to, she told me this, and she said that, you know, like, maybe I should go as her refund and just leave. Maybe I can't handle this. But she told me this, and she said that we used to have her house

at the top of the staircase over here. And they've moved her to a different spot because, as you can imagine, that's how they used to get new exhibits. Yeah. So there you go. You had that one for free, you know, I was off. Be prepared, because that really, and maybe that was why it was a little overwhelming for Charlie. That's really the first thing you encounter.

You walk into the first gallery, and there's the soap lady, and it's a lot. It's a lot if you're not prepared. But now you are, so you're going to be fine. And you're not going to pass out. I didn't pass out because I didn't realize what I was looking at. There's no punch line there. I'm just not a very smart person. Moving on from there, I think what was probably the next thing that may have done it in

for Justin and Charlie is the wall of skulls. So metal. It does. The skull collection was donated later. This was not part of the original mootor collection, but it was donated by Dr. Joseph Hurdle, who was a Viennese physician, who donated the whole thing in 1874, and the reason he amassed this giant collection of 139 human skulls, not just because he was like a weirdo with a fetish or something. No, I'm not. No, he didn't

just want to keep them in his house and look at them. He had a good reason, a medical reason. He collected them all because he wanted to disprove for analogy. For analogy, of course, being the pseudoscience that you can feel the bumps on somebody's head and then predict, like, are you going to be a criminal? What kind of job will you have? How smart will you be? All the different things about you. And he said, this is nonsense. This doesn't make, you know, I'm going to show you your wrong by collecting all these skulls, and along with them, he collected the name, and their occupation, and their age, and how they died.

And so you can see all that along with the skulls, which is really interesting, because usually, I mean, usually when you encounter a skull, you don't get that kind of information. It's true. You know, I'm always left hanging. of information. It's true. You know? I'm always left hanging. Who skull was it?

What were they into? Were they made of soap? And it really is fascinating, because you see like there's skulls on the wall that a lot of these were collected from poor people because he didn't steal them. I'm not, he didn't steal, I mean, I don't know that everything was on.

That's the first line of his biography. Joseph Reuter did not steal poor people's skulls. I did not steal these skulls. He didn't steal them, although we are looking at a time when grave robbing and things did happen. But I can imagine there were a lot of questionably ethical deals made with families like, you know, I could really use that skull.

I could make it worth your while. Do you remember when they were alive, did they ever talk about being on a wall? Well, there's dreams about to be realized. And so you can look and they have like tight rope walkers, one who died of a broken neck. I think we could piece that together. You can find there's like a famous prostitute listed under one. And then like I said, you can learn all about them, which I think is really interesting just from like a personal standpoint to remind you that these are not just like, oh, weird,

there are some skulls, but to remind you that these are medical, this is medical history, these are things we're learning, these helped advance scientific knowledge, and these were people, and they made this contribution to history and knowledge. I think that's great. I don't think a lot of people pass out there. No.

One interesting point that Jillian told me that I didn't know, and she said this is like background info, when the museum picked up in popularity, because when it was first built, they did not expect it to have the kind of traffic that it does. And I can attest to that. We went yesterday, and it was very busy. But they weren't prepared for that. So initially, all of the vibrations from the foot traffic of all the people walking past the big glass encased

wall of skulls was actually kind of shaking them and causing them to break and like teeth to fall out. And all kinds of things to happen. They were moving around in there and they weren't prepared for that. So the solution is that they had to make like personally crafted stands to fit every single skull in the collection. And there's not like a person who does this. There's things like you can't look that up like Google like personalized skull stand for my skull collection. Who does this?

So they had one person who works, they're building them. Each one by hand in the basement to fit each one of those skulls. And like the wooden frames, like if you look at them, she would tell me those wooden frames are for Michaels. Like they're just stuff that they figured out, how to put this together and build all these skull frames. There was a popular cat.

He didn't get weird at all though. He stayed very normal throughout the entire 100th skull stand-making process. It's beloved. My personal favorite exhibit that I had heard of ahead of time and I got to see, and also a very popular fainting spot on our list of three fainting spots was the giant mega colon. Woohoo! You know, I'm a scientist. I had to bring along a very scientific example, as you can see. This is exactly what the giant mega colon looks like.

CitiFarra podcast audience, can you describe what you're holding a lot there? I'm holding a stuffed colon with a smile. A smile. This is one of my favorite things that I now own. So the story behind the giant mega colon, and I'm particularly fascinated with this because one of the first surgeries I ever personally encountered as a medical student was the removal of a giant mega colon. I'm not sure how the story of the giant mega colon ends,

but I'm betting it starts at Apple Bees. Right. I don't think there was an Applebee's back then. Ye old, you know, whatever. Theodore, Ronaldo Ignatius Fridays or whatever. For that S&M. So, the Applebee be started somewhere, city. They did have them in olden times somewhere. They're may not have been as many of them all grant you.

So, the... The original owner... Did they have Golden Crow back then? I hope not. Man, I'm just eliminating potential sponsors left and right here, huh? So the original owner of the giant megacolon before it came to live in the Mooter Museum had a condition called hersprung's disease, which

is when you don't have proper nerves to part of your colon. And so things don't get moved along, kind of like pushed along like they're supposed to. And stool can just sit in your colon. And you don't get moved along, kind of like pushed along, like they're supposed to. And stool can just sit in your colon, and you don't have a bowel movement, so it just keeps collecting there. And the colon continues to descend and get larger and larger. And with that, your belly gets larger and larger, and it's painful, and you can't go to the bathroom. You okay? I'm fine. and it's painful and you can't go to the bathroom. You okay?

I'm fine. And you can see, the colon itself is impressive if you look for pictures of this patient, which I did. How's your day going? Pretty good, huh? It's incredible. Three time to kill. So he was born with this condition from pretty early on. He had problems with constipation.

It got really bad as he got older. As a teenager, he was having like a bound movement every month about on average. So as you can imagine, pretty miserable. Get a lot done. I'm into that biohacking lifestyle. I'm sitting on that. Maximize your time.

He actually, he... Kim Ferris is the one hour monthly duty. He used to show himself at like, like, dime stores and things as the balloon man because his stomach was so enlarged. But eventually he succumbed to the disease at 29 and his colon after he died. After he died. I'm just trying to have a few laughs.

The expense of this porginal menu that I make and beef it before it's 30s. Thank you. I feel bad. I'm the bad guy, sorry. I don't think it's a good guy. I didn't to see my Mr. Creoside jokes that I wanted to, but I thank you. I appreciate that.

His colon is in a museum. I don't think this was surprising. I think we knew where this was added, but it was full of... That's true. I did not think that it was full of stuff wandering around. I feel great. Why did I think of this years ago? I should have just put it in a museum. I don't want it thinking of it. Perfect. So it was full of 40 pounds of feces.

And the largest part of it is 30 inches in diameter. That's a very large colon. It is not currently filled with feces. I had to look at that. I was like, what's in there now? It's just stuffed to keep its shape, but you can see the toxic mega, or the giant mega colon if you want to.

If you don't want to. Yeah, you have, it's kind of way out in the middle. So you're gonna have to. Well, I made like a special, like we almost went past it quickly and I was like, wait, hold on. I gotta get a closer look.

I've heard about this. One thing we didn't get to see, but I had heard about, were the anthropodermic books. Now, that means books that were bound with human skin, which do exist in the library at the museum, but you don't get to see them. I heard about Jillian was telling us about the library. They have this amazing library with just tons

of old, very old medical texts that, oh, I want to see. And she said, like, the floors are made of glass because light is good for books. I got to see this library. I just wanted to peek at it. But among their collection are five books that are bound in human skin. Three of them all came from the same person.

Who's excited about this? Heck yeah, bound in human skin, do it. And it's this weird story about the woman and the doctor who collected the skin. So her name was Mary Lynch. She was a poor Irish woman who came to Philadelphia General Hospital, which was known as Old Blockly at the time. And this was in July of 1868. And she had tuberculosis.

That's why she was there. She was ill and it was a very hot summer. And she was there for a while, and her family, meaning well, started bringing her extra food to help with her recovery while she was there, in addition to what she was getting at the hospital. And specifically, they brought her a lot of, like,

pork and baloney, and it was, like I said, it was a very hot summer. And from this food she was eating while she was in the hospital for tuberculosis. She ended up getting tricunella, which is a parasitic infection that you can get from pigs and the larvae after they get into your bloodstream, they can get cysts all through your muscles. And so what eventually happened, the sad story is that she eventually died of the tricunella. And time, wow, Sid.

Three minutes, it? And time. Wow, Sid. Three minutes. It's a record. Again, I already said her skin is used to make books. I get hair cut, so I'm fine. So this is what's weird. There was a doctor, Dr. John Huff, who was working on the ward. He wasn't actually her doctor, but he had a special interest in trick analysis.

And she got it, he wanted to study her and be involved in her case. After she died, he was the one who performed her autopsy and published the results, because she had a lot of larval cysts throughout her muscles. But he also took a piece of skin from her thigh and tanned it

in the basement of the hospital in a toilet And I mean this and at the time this would have taken like two to four weeks of tannin to do this Assuming that he was using similar procedures that you would do with animal skin, I guess He could have been using urine that that you can do with animal skin, I guess. He could have been using urine that you can use that for tanning. And here's the thing, I don't know why. I have no answer to you as to why he did this. I was watching City Research this last night.

She just kept looking more and more horrified. And I said, what's wrong, sweetie? And she's like scrolling. And she said, I'm just trying to get to the part with why. Okay. Okay. He, because he kept this for almost 20 years, this piece of tanned skin,

and then he bound three books in it. And then after he published them, after he released these books, so he sheds a歪. He, obviously. He wrote in it that it was bound in her skin. So it wasn't a secret. He didn't hide it. He was like, and thank you so much. Mary Lynch for your skin, which is of course used to bind these books. So they're there. You can't

see them. But oh my, and if anybody ever figures out why, I'd love to know why. I don't know why. Get at us. Just a couple of things to mention, because I know a know why. Get out of this. Just a couple of things to mention, because I know a run-along time, aren't we? Yes. A couple of things that are very popular at the museum you shouldn't miss. There are slides of Einstein's brain there that you can see.

Little microscope slides sections of his brain, which is interesting because the pathologist, of course, who did his autopsy, Dr. Thomas Harvey, had actually stolen the brain. Did not have the family's permission to do that, and kept it in a cider box under a beer cooler next to his bed for years until finally he got permission somehow. Again, and after he got permission, he created a bunch of slides and some of those slides you can now see in the museum. So that's a really not a popular fainting spot,

just a popular spot. You can see we've done a whole episode before on the conjoined twins Chang and Ang, famously joined at the side and despite that, they still went on to live full lives, get married, have a ton of kids. You can see their liver there, their preserved liver, and the teeny little band of tissue that was all that connected them, that now we could do surgery to correct, but back then we couldn't. You can see the teeny little band of tissue that connected them, and that was really neat to see.

And then you can also see recent donations like jars of skin, skin pickings that have been donated very recently. In 2009, a 23 year old woman sent them to the museum, which is, and the interesting thing about this In 2009, a 23-year-old woman sent them to the museum. And the interesting thing about this is she has a condition called Dermatillomania, Dermatillomania, where she compulsively picks her skin. And she collected it all and sent it to the museum.

And I think it's, I know, I know, but bear with me. I think this is very cool. They were at Gillian was saying they were debating, should we include this? Is this something that fits here? Does this fit what the museum is? And it's really neat, because they're rationales that this is a physical manifestation

of a psychiatric illness. And that's important for us to see, to remind us, that even though we can't always see psychiatric illness, that it is a medical condition, and that it should not be stigmatized and treated differently, then we treat all other medical conditions. And so that's the rationale, which I think actually, I mean it brought it home, I know for me looking at it and you see this jar of skin and you think, ah that would hurt so much, I think that visceral reaction is important. So I thought that was a really interesting newer addition.

And if you want to go, which, if you haven't, I mean, if you live here, you've probably already been. But if you haven't been, please go. So it's open 10 to 5 every day. They have over 20,000 pieces. They're not all on display at once, but they rotate in and out. A lot of these things I've talked about are permanent exhibits.

So you can see these any time you go. Right now, there's the Civil War medicine exhibit that Justin traumatized our daughter with. Talk her about. Got a little sneak peek of that. And they have cool art exhibits, too. There's one right now called Connective Tissue,

which is done by an artist, Lisa Nielsen, who has done this paper quilling and turned it into these anatomical sections. It's incredible. The detail in these, it's amazing. I don't know, it's amazing. And then they do all kinds of, like I said, lectures and research and outreach programs, things like the history of vaccines program, and they do, like, STEM initiatives for LGBTQ

youth. And I mean, they're involved in a lot of wonderful like public health and outreach programs Beyond just come to our museum and look at you know some interesting things so Last fainting spot. I didn't mention. Yeah, there's the wax. I wall So wall of their wax. They're not real but but I mean you can there's still they're pretty good They're real But They're good. But they're a bunch of eye disorders. So if you, there's your three fanings.

Don't miss them. If you go. Do you guys like podcasts? There's a lot more. First off, let me say thank you to the Philadelphia podcast festival for having us here. It's beautiful and fun. And this is the beautiful theater.

You got such a wonderful city here, and we've had such a nice time. If you want to see more shows at 330, you can see by the book in the balcony bar here. Just go watch them. 5 p.m. call your girlfriend is gonna be here. 630, we got TV guidance counselor at the balcony bar again, and then at 8 p.m. our dear friends,

the flop house are going to be right here for you to enjoy. And then Friday, July 21st, and their Max Fun favorite. We got this with Mark and Hal. You can get more information at thePhillyPodFest.com. So come see all those great shows and support them. Thank you to the podcast and the school of her. Having us here, thank you to the taxpayers for the use of our song Medicines as the intern outro of our program. And thanks to Maximum Fun Network, come to a lot of great podcasts, which you can go and enjoy at MaximumFun.org. But for now, and until next time, my name is Justin McElroy.

And I'm Sydney McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture Hardest Don't Listen or Support It Following the news is hard and it sucks. How do you know which stories are important? Which sources do you trust in this post-truth world of reactionary journalism?

I'm Brett Black And I'm Travis McRoy And we host a podcast called Trends Like These. We cover trending news stories. We debunk misleading clickbait headlines, and we always try to throw in a little bit of good news. In our quest for truth, so join us every week on MaximumFund.org,

or wherever podcasts are found. podcasters found.