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"Superb . . . Mütter Museum teaches you indelibly how strange life can be, how unpredictable and various. The [photographs], sometimes ghastly, sometimes heartbreaking, are mysteriously mesmerizing [and] will revise and enlarge your idea of what it is to be human."
— Newsweek
"The
images have an almost classical quality . . .
gorgeous and repulsive at once."
—The New Yorker
"This is a book of hauntingly beautiful images. Only magnificent photographs like these can do justice to the uniqueness of the Mütter Museum, a place of wonder and an unparalleled collection that startles the imagination while it widens a visitor's sense of our shared humanity."
— Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D.,
author of How We Die
 Heart © 1994 Olivia Parker |
The aesthetics of the living body have long fascinated artists working in every medium of art. Mütter Museum presents the work of a distinguished group of photographers who have been drawn to explore the body stripped of its superficial coverings down to its inner realities. There is real beauty beneath the surface both in life, as revealed by the surgeon's scalpel, and in death, as revealed by the pathologist's or anatomist's knife.
The contemporary photographs in this book, combined with powerful images from the Museum's historical photography collection, stretch the boundaries to find beauty not in its conventional form, but in its opposite: the deformed, the broken, the disfigured body of those who suffered physical abnormality, trauma, or destructive disease. There is a terrifying beauty as well in the spirits of those who endured nature's challenges to human life and to medical understanding.
In Memoriam
Gretchen Worden (1947-2004) passed away on August 2, 2004 after a brief
illness. We're proud to have published Mütter Museum with her. The book
stands as a crowning achievement in her exemplary life. We're grateful too
for our
friendship with her for nearly two decades. She is greatly missed.
