Futhermore...

One additional thought about the Mutter Museum.

The stated purpose of most museums or historical societies is to educate the public and to preserve art or historic objects. What does it mean for a museum to educate the public? On a basic level, a museum wants the visitor to understand things like how a fid or seam rubber is used or how Pablo Picasso revolutionized the art world. A museum visitor should exit the building having learned something.

I would argue, however, that that something should be more than basic facts or historic timelines. Museums and historic sites should always teach one something about him or herself. Because art and historic objects are three-dimensional and therefore tangible, they possess a sense of naturalism that history books and labels simply cannot replicate. They are the "living" remnants of times and people long since gone. Nancy Moses, former director of the Atwater Kent Museum in Philadelphia (which is, incidentally, on my list of places to visit) once said that historic objects are "very powerful, infused with meaning, for they tell us who we are as individuals and as a society; they connect us with our past." [The book is called Lost in the Museum: Buried Treasures and the Stories They Tell. It is delightful. Look into it.] Historian David Lowenthal agrees, and claims that "a past lacking tangible relics seems too tenuous to be credible." [The Past is a Foreign Country; also a fanstastic read.] Therefore, in order to fully understand the past, one has to understand historic objects. Why bother to understand the past? Because it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to understand who you are and where you have come from without a comprehension of the past.

What does this mean? In essence, it means that a visitor should leave a museum having learned something about himself or herself, not just bits of trivia.

What does this have to do with the Mutter Museum, you ask? The majority of the museum's collection is not historic objects per se; rather, it is a collection of bones, organs and tissue. But how better for a visitor to understand from where he or she has come than by understanding the human body and how it works?

The museum represents material culture with a fascinating twist, which gives me one more reason to return.