The Mutter Museum

This is a medical Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia which displays preserved, bottled, stuffed, polished bodies, organs, skulls, growths all illustrating the effects of deformity and disease. A woman called Gretchen Worden was the curator from 1982 and increased the number of visitor dramatically, from hundreds to thousands by T.V appearances where she showed off some choice exhibits. After her death, a room was named after her.

An article in the New York Times describes the room that was opened in September 2005.
‘There are jars of preserved human kidneys and livers, a man’s skull so eaten away by syphilis that it looks like a pounded rock. There are dried severed hands shiny as lacquered wood, showing their veins like leaves...and Jim and Jo the green-tinted corpse of a two headed baby, sleeping in a bath of formaldehyde’

I think if I had given birth to Jim and Jo I would not let them be pickled and put on display to horrify and titillate the visitors! I wonder how these specimens were procured? Mothers were probably told that they would not want to see their dead baby as it was 'horribly deformed.'
But you would think that the parents would want to have a proper burial. I don't think they were given the choice.