A 19th-century medical museum, still open

A surgeon's dying gift created this museum

The Mütter Museum is a medical history museum, still open to the public, housed inside the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It holds more than 25,000 specimens: skulls, skeletons, wax models, and preserved organs, gathered since the 1800s to teach doctors what disease looks like from the inside.

The idea came first from Dr. Isaac Parrish, who in 1849 urged the College to save pathological specimens before they were lost to science. The collection stalled when Parrish died in 1852. It was revived by Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon born in Richmond, Virginia in 1811, orphaned by age seven. Mütter trained at the University of Pennsylvania and became chair of surgery at Jefferson Medical College, where he built his own teaching collection of bones, wax figures, and jars of diseased tissue. In Paris he bought a wax cast of a woman with a horn-like growth from her forehead to her chin. He was the first physician in Philadelphia to use anesthesia on a patient, and he devised the "Mütter Flap," a skin-grafting technique surgeons still use.

In 1858, Mütter gave the College his entire collection and a $30,000 endowment. Mütter's terms were strict: hire a curator, fund yearly anatomy lectures, and build a fireproof museum within five years. He died in 1859, two months after signing the agreement, and never saw the building rise.

The first museum building met Mütter's deadline

The College met Mütter's deadline in 1863, opening a brick museum at 13th and Locust Streets. A third floor was added later as the collections grew. By 1887, the surgeon S. Weir Mitchell called it one of the most valuable collections in America, though some members doubted how often doctors actually used it for study. That building was torn down in 1930; the lot is now a parking lot.

A Beaux-Arts building replaced the original museum

In 1909, the museum moved into its current home, a Beaux-Arts building at 19 South 22nd Street designed by the firm Cope and Stewardson. Movers carried over the original wood-and-glass display cases from the old building, and matched new ones to look just like them. The design copied European museums: an open lower gallery ringed by a mezzanine, letting daylight fall on the specimens below.

St. James Episcopal Church had stood at Walnut and 22nd since at least 1870, later adding a Guild House and a tower, and it was demolished in 1946.

Famous specimens joined the collection over a century

The collections kept growing through the twentieth century. Curators added specimens that are now the museum's most famous holdings: the conjoined liver and death cast of Chang and Eng Bunker from their 1874 autopsy, a cutaneous horn removed from a Parisian widow, and half of Albert Einstein's brain. The skeleton of Harry Raymond Eastlack, who had a bone disease called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, went on display and later guided doctors studying the same disorder in other patients. In October 2008, the building earned National Historic Landmark status and a place on the National Register of Historic Places.

A neighbouring church joins the museum's campus

In 2023, the College bought the former Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem next door, the old Church of the New Jerusalem, for $9.3 million. In November 2025, the College announced plans to join the two buildings into one campus, with shared, accessible entrances. Construction was set to begin in 2026.

Today the museum holds more than 25,000 specimens and draws over 130,000 visitors a year. Visitors can still see the Hyrtl Skull Collection, the "Soap Lady," and Eastlack's skeleton, displayed in cases built to look like the ones Mütter's own museum used in 1863.