Postmortem, Ep. 5: A reckoning

, reporter Ally Jarmanning digs deeper into the"legitimate" realm of body-parts collecting ⁠— museums ⁠— and asks the burning question: How different is this from the world of Jeremy Pauley in his basement or Cedric Lodge seizing a financial opportunity at Harvard's morgue.At the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, she takes us through displays of skeletons and sometimes-troubling human specimens.

I'm not sure what I was expecting. But the Mütter, it's unlike any museum I've been in before. It doesn't look like a museum at all.All right, walking in, you're just, the first thing you're struck by is this long wooden and glass cabinet filled with skulls.139 skulls, to be exact. And that's just the start. There's the world's tallest skeleton on display, tumors in jars, a distended colon.

It feels like walking into a 19th-century study. Wooden cases span the walls. Heavy drapes cover the windows. There's this haunting music that’s filtering in from an exhibit about the 1918 flu pandemic.The mission of the museum is the mission of the college, which is to advance the cause of health while upholding the ideals and heritage of medicine.Kate Quinn is the executive director and is showing me around today. The museum is closed on this Tuesday, so we have the space to ourselves.

And they're asking themselves how and why some of the human specimens are on display. Not just can we display this, but should we? What is ethical? What does consent look like? Our questions moving forward: Is this research? Is this science? What does it mean to be on display? Is that something they would have agreed to?The Mütter isn't the only institution asking these questions. The American Museum of Natural History in New York pulled all its human remains from public display and is working to repatriate what it can.

But just this spring, Harvard announced it removed the human binding and is working to find a final respectful resting place for the remains. For some of us, places like the Mütter and all of its complicated, sometimes macabre glory are the only place we can go to feel human. Places like this hold our histories. We deserve to be able to see ourselves reflected somewhere in this world, even if it's under glass.It's this complexity that made me want to visit the Mütter. Not so I could ogle some dead bodies, but to find out how Kate Quinn and her staff are working through these questions.

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