Medical museum in Philadelphia overhauls policies on human remains to meet modern ethical standards

A medical museum in Philadelphia has redrawn its policies on the collection and display of human remains, limiting its acceptance of additional specimens and working to follow “evolving modern medical ethical standards” in how it handles the 6,500 organs, bones and other body parts in its collection. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which owns the Mütter Museum, announced it is restricting the taking of photos and videos of human remains, allowing it only with the museum’s permission. Photography by the public will remain prohibited. The museum “will allow photography as long as it sort of serves an educational purpose,” said Sara Ray, its director of interpretation and engagement. “But education itself is a pretty broad net that we’re working through.” The great majority of the remains were collected from about 1840 to about 1940, mostly from Philadelphia, largely body parts and organs that were considered to be helpful in medical education and taken during autopsies or surgery. Such collections were not uncommon among medical societies at a time when specimens were critical to understanding how the body is structured and how it works. But most of those museums are long gone. The Mütter Museum said it is also working to “de-anonymize” its collection by looking into the personal histories of its human remains to figure out who they are, if possible, and to “do justice” in how it displays them and tells their stories. The goal is to exhibit them in the context of the history of medicine, bodily diversity and the tools and therapies used to treat them. “The goal is not finding an identity for finding an identity’s sake,” Ray said. “The goal is to find an identity so that we can build a richer biographical profile, through which we can then ask questions about the way that this person navigated the world. And so that’s going to look very different for every single specimen.” This article was provided by The Associated Press.