Listening to Skulls

On a recent trip to Philadelphia, my husband David and I visited the Mütter Museum. We were in town vacationing with family, and my husband, a general surgeon who trained in Philadelphia, insisted that I see the exhibit. It was a chance to escape not only the smothering heat that bathed the city's pavement but also my own complacency toward the marvels of medicine that once captivated me during medical school.

It is not often that David and I get to discover medicine together. He has his world, and I have mine. It was thrilling, both as physicians and as a couple, to hold hands and stare into the glass cases of floating medical oddities. We wandered between glass shelves lined with antiquated surgical instruments and meticulously sliced sections of the human brain. I found myself mesmerized by the torso of Siamese twins, the wet specimens of fetuses with grotesque anomalies, and the delicate “soap woman” who died of yellow fever in the 19th century.

After touring the entire exhibit, I found myself stopped in front of a curious display case. There on the far wall in the very back of the Mütter Museum, illuminated by the dusty light of halogen bulbs, skulls peered down. Rows and rows and rows of human skulls. Each sat …