Memento Mütter

http://muttermuseum.org/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/

The website of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia's Mütter Museum presents a virtually curated online exhibition entitled "Memento Mütter" that invites digital visitors to consider what it means to be human by exploring more than sixty eighteenth- to twenty-first-century medical artifacts, half of which are not currently on display in the museum. This interactive digital cabinet of curiosities includes a papier-mâché eyeball model, an anthropodermic book, a necklace of warts, and a perplexing array of inhaled and swallowed objects from Dr. Chevalier Jackson's Foreign Body Collection.

Memento Mütter touches on the harsh realities of our corporeal existence and inevitable demise, which the curators summarize rather neatly, if not bluntly, into several categories including: "penetrating," "suffering," "dissecting," "consuming," and "oozing."

(Medical) museums, archives, and galleries are increasingly being challenged or seemingly compelled to share their collections with the world via digital catalogues. Memento Mütter offers digital visitors a unique and immersive experience that goes beyond scrolling through monotonous inventories of medical memorabilia, archival manuscripts, or largely static online exhibits.

Under the title "Where Bullet Meets Bone," the digital visitor can virtually get to grips with a shattered femur of a Civil War soldier, penetrated by a bullet. Viewers can rotate, tilt, and magnify a photograph of his reconstructed limb bone, which is accompanied by graphic archival clinical photographs that force us to reflect upon the impact of these life-changing injuries. Connectivity to contextual sources is a key strength of this online exhibition.

Are random digital visitors the intended (target) audience for Memento Mütter? Or does this exhibition simply serve to entice prospective audiences (of all ages) to physically visit (or return) to the Mütter Museum? Memento Mütter can work on all of these levels. One may simply view, rotate, and tilt these intriguing digital artifacts. The exhibition may also serve as a user-friendly portal for laypersons, the curious, interdisciplinary researchers and historians alike who wish to explore the College of Physicians of Philadelphia's expansive collections including the museum, library, as well as current and past online exhibitions.

Digital exhibitions can breathe new life into "doubly dead collections"—that is, those in storage, or no longer displayed or utilized on a regular basis. Not all medical museums or curators of historical human anatomical, pathological, and surgical collections are at liberty to share their collections with the world (physically or virtually) for complex ethical and legal reasons.

Memento Mütter perhaps inadvertently raises ethical and legal questions routinely faced by those working with historical collections of human remains. Many of the artifacts are accompanied by accession numbers, dates, and the name(s) of donors. Following his death in 1973, Harry Eastlack, who suffered from fibrodysplasia ossificans progressive, donated his skeleton for scientific research; it is now on display at the Mütter Museum. The circumstances surrounding other donations, for example an anthropodermic book, are ambiguous. In 1869, John Stockton Hough, a physician at the Almshouse at Philadelphia General Hospital, removed the skin from the thigh of Mary Lynch, who died from tuberculosis and encysted trichinosis. Eighteen years after her death, Dr. Hough used Mary's skin to partially bind several books.

Memento Mütter is an eye-opening and unique online exhibition, but it is also thought provoking, and leaves the curious-minded digital visitor wanting more. The virtual curator(s) ask us to consider: "What does it mean to be human?" In my opinion, we should not simply remain content to view the artifacts on a screen, but strive to use all our senses to engage with these collections in reality.