A shake-up at the Mütter Museum means it could get way less weird

Robert D. Hicks loved the Mütter Museum so much he and his wife planned to leave their entire estate to the museum’s parent organization, the College of Physicians.

But last week, he resigned from his position there as senior consulting scholar — and cut the Mütter out of his will.

In his letter of resignation, he urged the College of Physicians’ board of trustees to investigate the Mütter’s new leaders, College president and CEO Mira Irons and Mütter executive director Kate Quinn, and what he called the “deconstruction of the museum.”

It’s one of several letters the board has received ahead of its meeting on June 6, all voicing alarm about the changes under the new leadership over the last six months.

These actions — mostly centered on concerns about displaying human remains — include taking down much of the Mütter’s online presence, backing off programming, and questioning the appropriateness of popular Mütter exhibits, like the one on teratology, which examines fetal deformities and abnormalities and displays several fetuses in jars.

Quinn and Irons say they do want to revamp the 160-year-old museum — for the better. They’re short on specifics but say their aim is to make the Mütter a contemporary institution “focused on health and well-being,” not death, said Quinn.

Critics say these changes have been reactionary, arbitrary, and without a clear strategy — and threaten the very soul of the museum. More than 7,000 fans, including celebrity magician Teller, have signed an online petition calling to “protect of the integrity of the Mütter.”

In his letter, Hicks implored the board to act to “at the least, forestall changes that damage the reputation of the College, ruin a Philadelphia treasure, and cause a significant revenue stream to evaporate. The timing is urgent.”

The Mütter began with a donation of 1,700 objects and specimens from surgeon Thomas Dent Mütter in 1863. The collection expanded through acquisitions and donations from college fellows, who are members of the private society of physicians. Those donations included body parts gifted from living donors and even some Mütter staffers. Though initially the collection was available only to medical students and doctors, the public began visiting in bigger numbers around the 1970s.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, Gretchen Worden, the Mütter’s late and legendary former director, boosted attendance via a popular museum calendar and her appearances with late-night TV host David Letterman. Leadership at the time deemed them both unseemly and contrary to the health-oriented image they wanted to promote and ordered them cut short.

In the end, the Mütter retained its exhibits and its identity. “Disturbingly informative” became its motto.

Over the last decade, the museum has become increasingly popular, attracting an average of 130,000 visitors annually and providing consistent revenue for the college (despite a pandemic downturn). In fiscal year 2022, the college reported earning a record high of $2,996,875 from museum admissions and store/library services. In previous years, museum earnings comprised close to a third of the college’s revenue.

In 2021, the college named pediatrician and geneticist Irons as its CEO, the first woman to hold that position. She hired Quinn, the former head of the Michener Art Museum, to serve as the Mütter’s first dedicated executive director.

While Quinn and Irons came on board during a time of record strength for the museum, it was also a time when the broader culture was beginning to demand more accountability around how museums acquired their collections. Prior to working at Michener, Quinn served as director of exhibitions and special programs at the Penn Museum. Soon after she left, the museum was the target of heightened scrutiny and public outrage for keeping remains from victims of the MOVE bombing in their collection.

In January, just a few months after Quinn started, the Mütter was named in a ProPublica investigation and Inquirer follow-up about institutions with remains of Indigenous people in their collections that have not yet been fully repatriated.

Right after the articles posted, Quinn instructed staffers to scrub all images of any human remains from the Mütter’s online collections.

“The ProPub article and Inquirer follow-up piece certainly caused me to actually look at the representation of human remains and all of our content online, and we determined that the content on our YouTube channels would benefit from review,” Quinn said in an email to The Inquirer. “The timing of those two articles, back to back, jump-started the process.”

Within days, the museum removed nearly all its YouTube videos, a popular online exhibit, and many images from its website and Instagram account.

The YouTube channel hosted videos aimed at a broad audience, like an unboxing series revealing a giant bladder stone, or a clip about medical pick-up lines. Before the museum removed 450 videos, the channel had attracted 113,000 subscribers and earned 13,493,149 views; now the channel has a mere 17,729 views for just 12 videos.

Robert Pendarvis participated in one of the videos. He donated his enlarged heart, caused by a rare condition called acromegaly, to the Mütter after receiving a heart transplant. “The acromegaly community has used the videos as education with the medical community…MY STORY IS VERY IMPORTANT,” he wrote in an email to Quinn after the videos were taken down without warning. (Quinn replied, assuring him the heart itself was still on display and the video removal only temporary).

A week after the ProPublica and Inquirer articles, London’s Hunterian Museum removed the skeleton of Charles Byrne, the so-called “Irish Giant,” after long-standing criticism. Byrne’s last request had been to be buried at sea so that his remains would not be dissected by scientists. After the Hunterian Museum’s actions made international news, Quinn removed a prominent banner of the Mütter’s “American Giant.” The skeleton, which had not been a subject of controversy, continues to be on view.

“I hope you understand that we are actively moving away from any possible perception of spectacle, oddities, or disrespect of any type for the collections in our care,” Quinn wrote in an email to staff on Jan. 17, explaining her decision. “I’m sure there will be more to come, so please bear with us as we move through this transition.”

The changes continued: the museum’s Dracula programming, done in partnership with the Rosenbach, was slated to run into the middle of 2023, according to former assistant director of the College’s Center for Education Kevin Impellizeri. But film screenings associated with the exhibit were canceled, and the exhibit itself was no longer in view as of late February. (Quinn denies that they were canceled, saying the museum fulfilled their agreement with Rosenbach.)

Erin Kimmerle, a noted forensic anthropologist, spent years planning an exhibit with Mütter in which she would create artistic likenesses from skeletal remains, making it possible to identify long-missing persons. A similar Mütter exhibit in the 1990s even solved a murder. The planning came to a halt soon after Quinn was hired.

“Because of what happened with the MOVE remains, [Quinn seemed to think] that somehow the negative publicity would follow us,” said Kimmerle. “I tried to stress every time we’ve done these events, we’ve solved cases. The families of the missing are very grateful.”

Quinn told The Inquirer that she never canceled the exhibit. But since their meeting in fall of 2022, Kimmerle said she hasn’t had any further communication with Quinn.

Marianne Hamel, a college fellow and chairwoman of the advisory Wood Institute, Library and Museum Committee, worked with Kimmerle on the stalled forensics exhibit.

She wrote the board on May 17 with her concerns. “The College is currently being led from a place of fear — fear of being ‘cancelled,’ censured, or publicly scolded,” wrote Hamel, a forensic pathologist. “This stance is precisely the opposite of the one that the College, and the Museum, should be taking — that of a thought leader and trailblazer in the sensitive use of human remains for the purpose of education. In attempting to duck responsibility and avoid controversy, College management has invoked criticism that it was trying so desperately to avoid.”

Hamel claims that there’s been a staff exodus in the last six months — 13 people out of about 50 people have left, including key employees — and she says it’s a reaction to these “disturbing trends.”

Aside from informing the board of his resignation, Robert Hicks — who had also served as the Mütter’s former director — said Irons and Quinn are “risk-averse in the extreme” and have an “elitist and exclusionary view of the museum.” He wrote that staff told him they were perturbed by Irons’ comments that she “can’t stand to walk through the museum” and that her “life would be much better if the museum was for physicians only.”

In an email to The Inquirer, Irons said Hicks “is relying on hearsay and distorting the meaning of my words to present a twisted picture of our intentions.” She does admit that questions about proper context for anatomical exhibits were less of a concern when the museum was only open to medical professionals.

“It’s important to remember that the Mütter museum actually started as a teaching museum for medical students, which is a different kind of museum because medical students and their professors can contextualize each of those objects,” said Irons. “Once it pivoted and became a public museum, we had a responsibility to help with that contextualization.”

One exhibit undergoing such scrutiny is the teratology exhibit. While the fetuses are still on view, several staffers told The Inquirer that Quinn had directed staff at one point to remove the exhibit. Quinn said the exhibit is a target of the strategic review.

Many people “find it disturbing and they find it very disrespectful that these unborn children are in jars here,” she said.

Irons says some fetal specimens are “difficult to view” because they are currently presented as “a spectacle for visitors” without enough explanation.

College fellow George Davis, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, believes it should stay. He said some of his patients donated their fetuses to the teratological collection because it helped their loss have meaning.

“There are so few institutions like the Mütter that provide people with unique understanding and insight to what is the human condition,” Davis said. “What museums do you know where people come away asking more questions than they had going in? These are the types of exhibits that engage people and invite them to open their minds. It’s an invaluable resource, and it needs to be preserved.”

Amid all the kickback to the recent changes, Quinn sought to calm agitated supporters and college members.

In early April, Quinn and Irons emailed college staff to say there was a “great deal of misinformation circulating at the moment,” they wrote. They emphasized that their efforts aimed to “implement best practices…and [ensure they are] ethical and respectful stewards of the human remains that are entrusted to our care.”

By May 12, the museum posted a message on Instagram acknowledging the discord in the social media comments and insisting that the review is “critical” to improving their visitor experience. The statement also said that in coming months the Mütter will “host a series of discussions about our future” and will invite the public to participate.

“We’ve already begun with the human remains committee, an ad hoc committee that’s part of the College, and we’re talking to them on a fairly regular basis,” Quinn said. She’s invited focus groups of humanities and medical history experts to provide feedback on their digital collections.

Quinn is also pursuing accreditation through the American Alliance of Museums.

The leaders plan to launch a new and comprehensive collections database, beginning the first phase in July, as a digital resource for the public and researchers alike. But viewers may not see any pictures of human remains in this database, unlike the interactive online exhibit, “Memento Mütter,” which Quinn removed in January as part of the digital takedown. The webpage, launched in 2016, provided an up-close and at times cheeky look at anatomical specimens and historical objects through high-resolution images; it offered unprecedented access to the collection online for those who couldn’t visit in person.

Quinn said some of those images could reappear in the new database if “we decide that’s the right thing to do.”

Evi Numen, one of the creators of “Memento Mütter” who served as the Mütter’s exhibitions manager and designer from 2009 to 2016, said it was “crushing” to see the platform disappear. “We did not shy away from what makes the Mütter collection quirky, and off the beaten path, and perhaps challenging for some.”

But Julia Haller, the new chair of the college’s board of trustees as of July 2022, says she is excited about the new direction, and that a review is overdue. “I was embarrassed by some of it, really,” she said of the YouTube videos that were mostly made by museum staff. “It was historically and scientifically inaccurate. … It just doesn’t live up to the standards of today.”

She’d like to see more young people get drawn to the college, and suggested that the college’s critics get involved in the review.

Earlier this year, the college bought two nearby historic buildings for nearly $9.3 million. Irons said that it will enable growth of the college and the roles it can fill, though the museum will not move into the new space. Before the pandemic, the college fundraised to renovate and increase the Mütter’s gallery space and create endowed staff positions for the museum; those plans will be reimagined now that the college will occupy a larger footprint.

With the college in a new building, Irons said she hopes to host public events and exhibits in that space. “We would love to have something for everyone in there,” Irons said.

Quinn acknowledged the Mütter is already quite popular, but thinks change is necessary, even if it costs them some of the Mütter faithful.

“Our hope certainly is to bring everyone along with us on this journey, but the reality is that doesn’t happen,” she says. “When these things occur, you’ll lose some folks along the way.”