Piece Description

When Thomas Dent Mutter began collecting specimens of medical anomalies, he probably had no idea that his collection would become a world-famous museum that receives over a hundred thousand visitors a year.

In this peculiar piece, we meet Richard Hicks, director of the Mutter, who helps us explore the museum through a historical perspective. We begin by questioning our perceptions of the human body and then move toward the bizarre specimens on display that remind us just how far medicine has come in the last several centuries.

As Hicks takes us to some of the major highlights of the museum, we begin to develop a sense of our own biological frailty, and come to see ourselves as experiencing a unique point in time, one in which we identify with a body that is malleable and more transparent, but limited by our own scientific understandings as well.