Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (27 page)

• There are no white dots on the city streets, but they are displayed on the computer screen. As Pac-Man moves from one intersection to another, the dots disappear from the screen. His general is responsible for keeping him up to date on which streets he still has to cover.

• The intersections at the four corners of the maze serve as power pellets. When Pac-Man reaches the intersection and tags the street sign, he “eats the pellet” and becomes invincible for two minutes. If he can tag any of the ghosts before the two minutes are up, they are “eaten” and have to return to their starting point before they can continue chasing Pac-Man. Of course, after the two minutes, the ghosts can chase and eat Pac-Man again.

• Pac-Man is the only character who knows everything that is happening in the game—his general is allowed to tell him where the ghosts are, but the ghosts’ generals are not allowed to tell them where Pac-Man is. Each ghost is allowed to know where the other ghosts are and whether or not Pac-Man has eaten a power pellet and become invincible, but they have to find Pac-Man on their own without help from their generals.

• The game continues until Pac-Man eats all of the dots or is eaten by one of the ghosts. Games can last anywhere from under 10 minutes to over an hour, depending on luck and how well the characters and their controllers work together.

Pac-Manhattan is a work in progress; the inventors say they’ll open their game to the public once it’s perfected. But you don’t have to wait until then—if you’ve got 10 people with 10 cell phones and a map of the streets where you live, you can set up your own game. The rules are posted on
www.pacmanhattan.com
.

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Famous people who have been homeless:
Charlie Chaplin, Shania Twain, Jim Carrey, Ella Fitzgerald, Don Imus, David Letterman, George Orwell, Eartha Kitt, Colonel Sanders, and William Shatner.

Warning! This unusual museum in Philadelphia is not for the faint of heart, but it’s worth a visit if you think you have the stomach. And if you don’t, don’t worry—they’ve got plenty of stomachs in the collection.

T
OOLS OF THE TRADE

In the 1830s a Philadelphia surgeon named Thomas Dent Mütter made a trip to Paris to round out his medical education. At the time Paris was one of the most medically advanced cities in the world and far ahead of anything the United States had to offer. Mütter came away very impressed by the systematic, scientific approach the Parisian doctors took toward treating human illness—patients suffering from the same malady, for example, were clustered together in special dedicated hospital wards, so that the doctors could compare their cases and gain insight from the experience.

Equally impressive were the enormous collections of medical specimens and models that the doctors had amassed—healthy (as well as diseased) skulls, skeletons, tumors, hernias, blood clots, appendages, bony growths, you name it—that were used to teach physicians the art and science of their craft. Mütter learned so much studying the specimens that when he returned to the United States he began assembling his own collection of specimens and using them in the lectures he gave as a professor at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.

By the mid-1850s Mütter’s own health had deteriorated to the point that he had to give up his teaching post. By then his collection had grown to more than 1,700 items, and he didn’t want it to sit in storage when it could still be put to good use. So in 1856 he donated the entire collection to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, along with an endowment of $30,000 to maintain and expand it. In those days Philadelphia was one of the leading centers of
American medicine, and the Mütter Museum naturally became a popular destination for medical oddities, thanks not only to the acquisitions made possible by Mütter’s endowment, but also to the fact that physicians all over the country began sending the strange items they encountered during the course of their work—giant hairballs swallowed by patients in mental institutions, shrunken heads collected from natives in Peru, skeletons of people suffering from countless crippling and bone-twisting diseases, brains of several prominent surgeons and at least one executed murderer, deformed fetuses floating in formaldehyde-filled jars, plus any number of syphilitic skulls, gangrenous lungs, cirrhotic livers, and other diseased organs, appendages, growths, and limbs.

More than a few historically significant items found their way into the Mütter Museum as well: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s bladder stones were donated to the museum; so was a piece of the “thorax” (chest) of John Wilkes Booth, and a brain sample from Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated President James A. Garfield in 1881.

Have you ever heard of Chang and Eng, the original “Siamese” twins? When they died on the same day in 1874 at the age of 63 (Chang died first, leaving Eng to spend the last hours of his life helplessly attached to a corpse as he awaited his own imminent death), the autopsy was performed right there in the Mütter Museum. Most of their conjoined bodies were returned to the family for burial, but the museum got to keep their shared liver and a plaster cast of their bodies (complete with a visible autopsy scar and a few armpit hairs that got stuck in the plaster).

A lot of things have changed in the nearly 150 years since the Mütter museum collection first went on display; medical school education has progressed far beyond the point where the skeletons of midgets and two-headed babies have any real educational value. By the early 1980s the museum was virtually forgotten, and the number of visitors had dwindled to well under a thousand people a year. Was it even worth keeping the museum open? The College of Physicians decided that it was—if nothing else the museum was
certainly a fascinating artifact of 19th century medicine, and one of the few still in existence. In 1982 the museum’s newly appointed curator, 35-year-old Gretchen Worden, decided that the best way to ensure its future was to raise its public profile in any way she could. She became a sort of roving ambassador of medical oddities, granting countless radio interviews over the years and appearing on TV shows as diverse as
The Late Show With David Letterman
and science documentaries broadcast on the BBC. She also wrote a coffee table book about the collection and began selling an annual calendar. These publications brought in needed funds and also did the job of putting the Mütter Museum back on the map—today more than 60,000 people visit the museum each year and pay $8–12 apiece for the privilege.

One of the strangest things about the Mütter Museum is the fact that it is still adding to its collection. Two examples: In 1973 a man named Harry Raymond Eastlack died from a disease called
fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva
, which caused bone to form in the muscles and connective tissue of his body. By the end of his life he was little more than a living statue, able to move only his lips. After he died at the age of 39, per his request his body was donated to science and his fused skeleton became a part of the collection.

In 1992, the parents of a baby born without a cranium (the part of the skull that holds the brain) donated her remains to the museum and she is currently on display in a formaldehyde-filled jar. In return for the donation, the parents asked only that they be allowed to visit the infant from time to time.

Think you’re ready to visit the Mütter Museum? Here are some things to watch for:

• President Grover Cleveland’s “Secret Tumor.”
Early in his second term as president (1893–97), Cleveland learned that he had cancer of the mouth. At the time the country was mired in one of the worst economic depressions in American history, and Cleveland feared the situation would get even worse if the public learned of his life-threatening illness. So on July 1, 1893, he
slipped aboard a friend’s yacht and surgeons cut out a large part of his upper jaw as the boat steamed up New York’s East River.

The secret surgery was a success—Cleveland was fitted with a rubber partial jaw that gave him a normal appearance and did not impair his speech, and he was able to serve out the remainder of his term without the public realizing what had happened. The full story did not emerge until 1917, when one of the attending surgeons, Dr. William W. Keen, donated the tumor and some of the surgical equipment used in the procedure to the Mütter Museum.

• The Soap Lady.
Early in the 19th century (no one is sure quite when), a morbidly obese Philadelphia woman was buried in a downtown cemetery. Many years later when the cemetery was being relocated as part of an urban renewal project, it was discovered that the environment in which the woman had been buried—damp soil with just the right chemical makeup—had turned her remains into
adipocere,
a substance similar to soap. The womans’ body was never claimed by relatives; the museum later acquired her for the princely sum of $7.50. A “Soap Man,” who was buried near the Soap Lady, ended up in the Smithsonian Institute (no word on how much he cost).

• The Collection of Obsolete Medical Devices.
Why stop at physical specimens? In 1871 the museum expanded into devices that are no longer put to use. Keep an eye out for the tonsil guillotines and the lobotomy picks; also watch for the brain slicing knife that, thankfully, was only put to use after the patient had died. “Two people are needed,” the display reads, “one to hold the brain in place, and the other to slice.”

• The Dr. Chevalier Jackson Collection of Foreign Bodies.
Dr. Jackson was one of the leading throat doctors at the turn of the twentieth century, and part of his job was removing objects that people had swallowed. He apparently kept every object he ever fished out of a gullet and plenty that others had, too; today more than 2,000 of them are lovingly categorized and displayed in drawers with labels like “Buttons,” “Pins,” “Nuts, Seeds Shells or Other Vegetal Substances,” “Toys,” “Dental materials” (dentures), and “Meat.”

We gave you a heads-up on assorted international delicacies on page 145. Here are a few more tasty treats from around the world.

MONGOLIA:
Boodog
—the flesh of a goat broiled inside a bag made of the goat’s cut and tied skin. The goat is then barbecued or cooked with a blowtorch.

BELIZE:
Cena Molida
, a popular mixture that includes roasted, mashed cockroaches.

JAPAN:
Odori ebi
, which are baby prawns, served live.

YUKON TERRITORY, CANADA:
In 1973, a Mountie found a frozen, unidentified human toe in an abandoned log cabin. A local tavern got a hold of the digit and invented the Sour Toe Cocktail, which consists of a shot of hard alcohol (drinker’s choice) sipped from a glass with the toe plopped in it. “You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow,” the drinker is told, “but the lips have got to touch the toe.”

ECUADOR:
Fried guinea pig.

THE NETHERLANDS:
Salted horsemeat sandwiches.

PORTUGAL:
You’ve heard the word “tripe,” but do you know what it is? It’s three of the four stomachs of a cow. It’s incredibly tough, so it’s boiled until it’s tender enough to chew.

THE PHILIPPINES:
Rat sausage.

CHINA:
A century egg is prepared by preserving a duck or quail egg in a “soup” made of clay, ash, salt, lime, and straw for several months. The white of the egg turns a translucent dark brown and the yolk turns several shades of green. Westerners who have tried
it likened the taste to a combination of a hardboiled egg and Jell-O. Need something to wash it down? Try some “three-penis wine,” an aphrodisiac made of one part boiled seal penis, one part boiled dog penis, and four parts boiled deer penis.

INDONESIA:
Monkey toes.

CAMBODIA:
Balut,
a popular snack sold by street vendors, is a boiled duck egg with a fertilized, almost fully developed baby duck inside. Street stands in Cambodia also sell cobra blood and fried tarantulas seasoned with sugar, salt, and garlic.

MEXICO:
Escamoles
, or fried ant larvae.

ENGLAND:
Black pudding is a sausage made by cooking pig, cow, or sheep blood along with the meat of the animal (and extra, added fat) until it’s thick and gelatinous. It congeals as it cools and then it’s served in slices.

FRANCE:
In the southern part of the country, donkey meat is commonly sold in butcher shops.

VIETNAM:
Whole baby mice, each about an inch long, are grilled and served with a spicy dipping sauce.

BURMA:
Grilled bat.