seeing/bringing the humanity

Today I listened to an interview of a woman named Gretchen Worden who was the curator of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. The Mutter museum shows medical abnormalities — before photography they would make casts of things for medical students to learn from. They have a wall of skulls and a bunch of preserved babies with congenital diseases — and all kinds of human deformities (like horns growing from foreheads and the world's largest colon). Anyway... I found myself crying at the end of the interview because this woman — you can just tell — was a really extraordinary person. She found real beauty in the abnormalities. She found humanity in the suffering. The descendents of Chang and Eng, the "original" siamese twins whose liver and body casts are in the museum — sent flowers to the museum with a note of appreciation for Worden's helping them to understand their grandfathers better.

That type of decency touches me very much. And I never knew who this woman was before today — days after she passed away — and my heart is both sad that she died and thankful that we had someone like that here on earth. We need more people like that.

» Fresh Air Interview
» Ms. Worden's obituary
» Mutter Museum