About Mütter Museum
The Mütter Museum preserves medical history in a form that can be impossible to ignore. Human skeletons, preserved anatomical specimens, wax and plaster models, historic instruments, photographs, pharmaceuticals, and other medical objects fill cases arranged with the density of an old scientific collection.
The museum grew from the collection of surgeon Thomas Dent Mütter, who donated roughly 1,700 objects and funding to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia in the nineteenth century. The first building created to house the museum opened in 1863. The collection later moved to the College’s present building on South 22nd Street.
Today the institution holds tens of thousands of specimens and objects spanning centuries of anatomy and medicine. The displays document disease, injury, medical treatment, anatomical variation, surgical practice, and the changing ways physicians have studied the human body.
The museum’s unusual material is presented as medical and historical evidence rather than as a sideshow. Visitors should expect real human remains and potentially difficult subject matter. Current admission, photography rules, and operating hours should be checked through the museum’s official website before visiting.