Twenty years ago, my professor in Biology 101 stood before a lecture hall of nearly a hundred freshmen and declared the human body an example of elegant, biological perfection. He had no idea what he was talking about.

Besides a handful of photos of historic places, the only other object that I own from my one visit to Philadelphia is a black silk-screened t-shirt, more likely to be found at a rock concert. It features a photo of two skeletons. One is the frame of an adult not three feet in stature and the other is that of a giant standing well over seven feet tall. They are both human, of course. Imprinted across the top, in bold, serif letters, with the dotted umlaut Ü associated with 80’s hair metal bands, is the name “Mütter Museum”.

The Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia is a choice destination for tourists with a taste for the unique. To get there, you must first walk away from the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall and the other symbols of our nation’s freedom that, these days, require a security clearance to view.

I recall, as I walked toward 22nd Street, that I expected a modern museum site such as you’d expect at the Franklin Science Center and Imax Theater. I looked for large parking lots, cavernous halls, giant man-made displays and concrete arches echoing the clatter of small children running. However, the Mütter is, first and foremost, a part of a college dating back to 1863. Happily, it has preserved its aspect of a Victorian observation room with dark-stained wood and sedate yellow lighting.

The museum specializes in displays of medical oddities and curiosities; some bizarre, some intriguing, but each and every one of them thought provoking in pertinent ways. On shelves are displayed the preserved remains of John Wilkes Booth’s thorax, brains of convicted criminals, President Grover Cleveland’s secret tumor, a huge colon, and Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s collection of objects people have swallowed and had removed without surgery. In the main viewing area, an open two-tiered viewing area reminiscent of the Victorian era surgical lecture halls, is a detailed history of conjoined twins, including a plaster cast of the famous Siamese Twins, Chang and En. There is also the soap woman, whose centuries old body was discovered perfectly preserved by a curious chemical process that reduced her skin and vital organs to a soap-like substance. There are other noteworthy, and wince inducing, displays such as the Eye Wall of Shame that exhibits various eye injuries. But of far greater substance, and implication, are the displays of foetal skeletons in various stages of development, and the images of bones shattered by bullets or violated by other violent means.

Mütter is far more than a physician’s museum. The sum total of its collection exceeds its conception as a place to contemplate our biology. It is a unique work of artistic expression depicting the human condition in a way that few artists have successfully reached in other mediums. If you have the stomach for it – its exhibits are unapologetically graphic – it is well worth your time to visit.