The Mütter Museum held a town hall to discuss its use of human remains. Things got tense.

It was an emotional night on the second floor of the Mütter Museum on Tuesday as the 160-year-old medical history institution held its first town hall on the ethics of the collection’s acquisition and display of human remains.

The event, part of the Postmortem: Mütter Museum, a Pew-funded project to gather community feedback, hosted about 75 people in a stately room in the College of Physicians building.

Among those who came to speak were community members, past and present Mütter staff, museum professionals, and people who described the museum as a special place that provided information on their medical conditions.

“I have an autoimmune disease that freezes my spine slowly over the course of my life … I was looking through the cases [at the Mütter] and I saw the actual bones of somebody else with my disease,” said Karen Andrade, a University of the Arts graduate student based in Merchantville. “It was like I was being seen and I was being acknowledged. It was not a plastic representation of anything. This was showing me that I wasn’t alone.”

The listening session was facilitated by Monica O. Montgomery, a museum studies professor at University of the Arts, and Kathleen McLean, a museum consultant based in Berkeley, Calif., who are part of the team of external experts leading Postmortem. The feedback project comes after the museum removed online content and indicated it would be making significant changes to its human remains collection, sparking outrage from fans who say the leadership intends to deconstruct the Mütter.

Montgomery, who specializes in repairing relationships between museums and their communities, said museum officials would not be answering questions in this first event, but would address concerns in future town halls. Behind the facilitators was a sign that read: “WE ARE HERE TO LISTEN.”

Julia Haller, the chair of the College of Physicians board, which oversees the museum, and Kate Quinn, the Mütter’s executive director, were both in attendance, as were several members of the board along with Mira Irons, who recently resigned as the College president.

Haller made opening remarks inviting the group to participate and disagree with each other, “provided you can do so without being disagreeable.” Quinn refrained from addressing the audience.

Each person was allotted two minutes to speak, and for an hour and 15 minutes, people shared their perspectives. Comments ranged from voicing a desire to preserve the museum to expressing concerns about the thousands of people whose body parts are on display without explicit consent.

“Museums are not hermetically sealed, like super glue,” said Josh Perelman, who works at another Philadelphia museum. “How can the Mütter grow and adapt in ways that are meeting the ethical, best practices of the field?”

Another attendee said she, like many of the people at the meeting, cared “deeply about access to medical information in an understandable way — but you can’t do that while also still causing harm and violence and perpetuating a history of violence and harm.”

A majority of the people who spoke seemed to feel the Mütter had generally treated its “residents” — as several people called the remains — with respect.

Kim Kelly, a South Philly-based writer, talked about having ectrodactyly, a rare condition that is also called lobster claw syndrome.

“People like me have been a staple of the sideshow and medical museums for centuries, but we’re rare outside [of] that context … The Mütter Museum’s exhibit on congenital deformities is the only place in the city of Philadelphia where I can see people like myself represented,” she said. “I fully support the museum undergoing an ethical review, but I wanted to emphasize for folks here that for some of us, places like the Mütter, in all its complicated, sometimes macabre glory, are the only places we can go to feel human.”

Some drew comparisons to other museums like the Penn Museum and New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which recently announced that they would remove human remains from display, while others said the Mütter differs from anthropological institutions and should follow its own course.

“The days when medicine was secret, when lay people were not supposed to understand the disease, those days are gone, and they should be gone,” said College of Physicians fellow Stanley Plotkin. “The public, as well as physicians like myself, have the right to see these diseases, and to understand these diseases better, and I am absolutely against changing the Mütter from what it is — an institution that has no parallel in the medical world.”

A handful of members of Protect the Mütter, a group of museum fans and former staffers who disagree with Quinn’s direction, also attended.

“Thirty-five thousand people have signed a petition saying that the leadership needs to change and that should be paid attention to!” a Protect the Mütter supporter shouted as the event ended.

“Well, this was intense. I think it was what we were hoping for,” Haller said afterward. “I was really pleased that people thought they could speak up, given the intensity of the emotion, including talking about the harm and colonial practices, saying that these are people who had no power in their lives and have had no power in their deaths.”

In addition to McLean and Montgomery, the team of experts guiding the project includes Amy Nieves, the executive director of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities; Alethia Wittman, a Seattle-based museum consultant specializing in inclusion; Nicholas Bonneau, a historian of science and medicine who teaches at Lancaster’s Franklin and Marshall College; Sally Yerkovich, a New York-based museum ethicist who teaches museum anthropology at Columbia University; Jeffrey Reznick, the head of the National Library of Medicine’s history of medicine division based in Rockville, Md.; and Monique Scott, an anthropologist who is the director of museum studies at Bryn Mawr College.

Postmortem will organize more town hall events, with the next one planned to be entirely virtual. The Tuesday event was live streamed to more than 160 viewers.