                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 3, 1993                   TAG: 9311030047
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA                                LENGTH: Medium

MUSEUM HAS LIFE'S GROSS FORMS

On a quiet side street, hundreds of people barely remembered for how they lived are memorialized forever for how they died.

Gigantic tumors. Syphilitic skulls. Brittle bones. Tubercular torsos. Infected eyes. All are preserved in the Mutter Museum, a place that brings medical students and curiosity-seekers together to see the unlikely and the unorthodox.

This museum of the medical macabre, gross anatomy at its grossest, is governed by one philosophy: Let it be preserved.

"This stuff is not spooky. It's you - you're looking at yourself," says Gretchen Worden, who, as curator for 19 years, combines zestful levity with a dignified scientific demeanor.

"Nothing that is human is foreign," she says. "On the other hand, everything that is human can frighten. It's a bit of `there but for the grace of God go I' coupled with some `thank God for modern medical science.' "

Under Worden's purview are more than 2,000 medical instruments and specimens, from a 7 foot, 6 inch skeleton to a basketball-sized ovarian cyst.

There are rows of malformed infants preserved in chemicals, a doctor's collection of 139 skulls, a baby born with no cranium, sliced cross-sections of a man's face, and a colon that grew to five times its normal size. Another display features a man who died when the tissue connecting his muscles turned agonizingly into bone.

One of the most popular exhibits is the "Soap Lady," a body buried in soil with properties that turned it into adipocere, a substance with soap-like qualities. The body arrived in 1874, and no one knows who she was.

It adds up to a jarring reminder of mortality - proof that a human body is sometimes truly no more than the sum of its parts.

"It's from the study of the abnormal that we learn about the normal," Worden said. "It tips us off."

The museum was founded in 1849 by the Philadelphia College of Physicians, which still operates it. It remained small until 1858, when Philadelphia physician Thomas Dent Mutter donated his extensive collection of pathological specimens and $30,000 to maintain it.

It grew from there, amassing collections as its reputation spread. It is one of the few 19th-century medical museums still operating.

"Do not use the word `bizarre,' " Worden said. "We are not bizarre. Something in a sideshow would be bizarre. We're mainstream, part of the medical education scene."

by CNB