After a two-year ethical review and a leadership shakeup in April, the Mütter Museum has committed to continuing its display of human remains with a new focus on giving visitors deeper context into the medical history behind its vast collection of biological specimens.
Leaders at the Center City museum, owned and operated by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia since 1863, outlined its new human remains policy Tuesday and explained how a contentious period of reflection helped pave the way forward.
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"The debate about whether to exhibit human remains really presents a false choice," said Sara Ray, the museum's senior director of interpretation and engagement. "The issue isn't whether we should or shouldn't exhibit human remains — full stop. Instead, the question is whether we can exhibit human remains in a way that does justice both to the people whose remains we hold (and) to the public that we serve."
Museums worldwide have been roiled by qualms over how to educate visitors while respecting the lives of people who never consented to have their body parts displayed for posterity. The majority of the Mütter's 6,500 human specimens — from a 9-foot-long colon to preserved fetuses and skulls — were collected before informed consent became the legal standard.
When the museum began its Postmortem ethical review two years ago, former Executive Director Kate Quinn and then-College CEO Mira Irons already had taken steps to scale back the Mütter's emphasis on oddities and marketing the macabre.
The museum removed educational videos about human remains on its YouTube channel, overhauled online exhibits so that they no longer included pictures of human remains and placed some specimens that had been on display back in storage.
The moves ignited backlash among longtime Mütter supporters who felt the museum was discarding its educational legacy and public appeal without taking a more nuanced approach to uncomfortable ethical questions. Focus groups, open houses and town halls produced feedback that seemed to pit different ethical outlooks against each other in ways that couldn't easily be reconciled without radically altering the museum.
Irons resigned in September 2023 and was replaced by former Temple Health President Larry Kaiser at the start of this year. When Quinn parted ways with the museum in April, the Mütter hired the joint leadership team of Ray and Erin McLeary, who serves as senior director of collections and research, instead of bringing on a new executive director.
Over the past several months, Ray and McLeary have been busy concluding the Postmortem review and formulating the new human remains policy.
"Human beings have a unique status in our collection," McLeary said. "These were once living people, or parts of living people, and they deserve the very highest level of respect and sensitivity in telling their stories."
The Mütter's updated policy will put more emphasis on personalizing and situating specimens within the history of medicine and science. Research undertaken during the ethical review showed that it was possible to de-anonymize most of the human specimens — particularly those that originated in Philadelphia — using ancestry records and archival research about patients' medical treatment and case records.
"The more that we learn about when a specimen was collected and what conditions they were collected under, that allows us to locate them in a more specific moment in medical history," Ray said. "Then we can speak with more authority about what therapeutics were available to that person or the way that people would have understood that disease at that particular time."
Over time, visitors will start to see new print and audio guides at the museum to provide this context. Most of the Mütter's old YouTube videos will be restored, and the online collections database gradually will include photos of remains.
Moving forward, the museum will limit further acquisition of human remains by considering only those offered by a living primary donor or by a decedent via request. For the first time, the museum also is starting the process of connecting with Native American tribes to return ancestral remains in accordance with federal law.
Ray said the goal has been to find "the slice of the Venn diagram" that modernizes practices while honoring the Mütter's heritage.
"This was a conversation that the museum owed itself, its visitors and its collections," Ray said.
On Wednesday from 5:30 to 8 p.m, the public is invited to attend a free event at the museum that will detail the new human remains policies and the research that backs them. Ray said the museum's goal is to embrace public fascination with human remains — and trust in the spirit behind learning about our bodies — as a way of connecting people with the lived experiences and medical journeys of the past.
"We are promising to reward your curiosity by teaching you something," Ray said.