i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Here's the current intro to chapter 9, all about the Mütter Museum and its very strange collections. If you're ever in Philly and have the chance to go, totally do it, it's amazing.

The College of Physicans of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum houses a novel collection of artifacts meant to “educate future doctors about anatomy and human medical anomalies” (Mutter, para. 1). One might call it a collection of collections, from a display case full of human skulls to abnormal foetuses in jars. Even the garden outside the museum is a collection, consisting of herbs used throughout the history of medicine. Visitors wander from display case to display case, reading descriptions and learning about the history of medicine and anatomy through artifacts. Every item is labeled with information including a title, a date of origin, a short blurb describing the artifact—sometimes a related story, and a unique identification number according to the museum’s own cataloging system. Certain artifacts, like the haunting preserved body of “The Soap Lady,” have additional information that can be accessed using traditional audio guides or smart phone apps.

But there's one sub-collection that best illustrates the defining notion of a collection—that is, it reflects the distinctive and perhaps idiosyncratic point of view of a collector. Chevalier Jackson, a distinguished laryngolgist, collected over 2,000 objects extracted from the throats of people who’d swallowed the objects. Items are categorized and cataloged in a binder that sits atop the wooden drawers where the artifacts are mounted like specimens in an insect collection. Like all the other artifacts in the museum, each item in the catalog has an identifier used to locate it in the cabinets, and a plaque with some descriptive information. But because of the peculiar focus and educational focus of this collection, and because there are few shared characteristics of “things people swallow that they should not,” the categories and facets used to organize and describe the collection would be of little use in another organizing system. What other collection would include toys, bones, sewing needles, coins, shells, and dental material? It’s hard to imagine that many other collections would include all of these items plus fully annotated record of sex and approximate age of patient, the amount of time the extraction procedure took, the tool used, and whether or not the patient survived.

Part of the fun of this collection is browsing, both by opening up the drawers and by flipping through the binder. The materiality of these ordinary objects that had been accidentally swallowed by people is shocking and the fact that they are grouped in categories gives the visitor a rough direction for browsing. But this collection can be browsed at the museum only; there does not exist an electronic version of the collection, like a slideshow, of artifacts. One might argue that, even though there is much to be said for the juxtaposition of the physical artifacts in these drawers, the collection could also be preserved digitally, as a digital archive. A high-quality photograph of each artifact could be displayed next to the same descriptive information contained in the heavy binder. Users could browse in a variety of ways, with facets (remember our discussion from Chapter 6) describing artifact type, patient age, and even the classes of “Survived” and “Did Not Survive.” This would not detract from the wonder of seeing the collection up close; rather, it would enable digital preservation, and, if put online, provide virtual access to those unable to travel to Philadelphia to see it in person. An online archive of digital representations in the form of photographs could even be a draw to the museum, an example of the unique and strange objects contained in the Mütter’s collection.