I visited the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians. It is a peculiar place, a dark and staid Victorian haven of monstrosity, deformity, and body relics, basically a freak show.

There is something scandalous about encountering an enormous colon that looks like a mighty worm, about regarding the skeleton of a giant with a ribcage so large a human being could squeeze into it whole, or about encountering the photographs, models and skeletons of conjoined twins attached at heads and chests, or with one head and two bodies. The tumors, as such things go, were not distinct enough to evoke much emotion, at least not in me. 

My brain, like that of most people, alerts quickly to oddities in human appearance (scars, birth defects, growths, differences in proportions, and so on), but I adjust quickly.

In general, though, I am not constitutionally averse to the biology of being human. My mother was getting her degree in microbiology when I was in middle school, and I often hung out after school in her office because it was across the street from my school. For a long while, she had a cat preserved in formaldehyde that was pinned, teeth bared, in a pan on her counter, while she meticulously took it apart. She prided herself in being callous to suffering, at least at that stage of her life. She renounced her coldness, or claimed she did, when she became an Episcopal priest. 

Later, I taught science myself, in a private boys school where the science department had an immense budget, so even though I was teaching fourth and fifth grade, my classroom had cabinets and drawers full of preserved animal specimens and an entire skeleton on a stand, whom we called “Mr. Bones.” I used to horrify the boys by inviting them to stand next to Mr. Bones, which made them realize he or she was not much taller than they were.

So the grandiosity of the dark gallery filled with skulls and specimens, some carrying human names and many not, did not particularly impress me, nor did the various antiquated medical instruments. 

It was definitely a mood, though. The architecture of the place was impressive. And I admit that I spent considerable time looking through the drawers of 2,374 objects retrieved from people who had swallowed or inhaled them, collected by a physician named Chevalier Jackson. 

The museum is engaged in a strenuous effort to make itself less of a spectacle and to identify (and even return, in some cases) the human remains exhibited there, and (though I wholeheartedly support the endeavor) that was one of the reasons I wanted to see it before it changed completely.

But what I really wanted, and the reason I have been hankering to visit the place, was to get into the Benjamin Rush Medicinal Plant Garden at the side of the building. I have looked through the bars of the iron fence into the garden many times, into a green glow of foliage with patterned brick walks, and every time I passed, I wanted to be inside that garden. 

So once I had seen the bodies, I had to get a delightful, friendly guard to show me how to get there. Once in, it was worth the whole expedition. 

I sat for perhaps half an hour, listening to the children playing in the yard of the defunct Swedenborgian church next door, listening to the birds singing, hearing the leaves rustling, feeling the sun on my legs, and knowing that there was traffic passing by outside the iron fence. There I was, inside, peaceful and content, where before I had been outside, in the hard city, at yet another tough moment in the course of human history, on an undistinguished street

I knew where I was, technically, but in that garden I felt as if I had been transported somewhere else entirely, a place where it was possible to be peaceful even if inside the building it was a charnel house.

I went back inside and paid for a membership. I’m going to sit in the herb garden whenever I am in the neighborhood, I think. And maybe I’ll also go and revisit the drawers full of objects people swallowed and inhaled.