Health & Medicine / Stem Cell Research

PHILADELPHIA I have a heavy summer cold this hundred-degree morning in the grimy cradle of American democracy, but at least I don't have what the guy next to me has. The poor chap—a Victorian fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde—has managed to land himself a nasty dose of exencephaly, or skull-lessness, meaning he has to wear the mass of his brain hanging down between his shoulder blades like the pendulous knit hat of a management-level Rastafarian. I make no claims to being a fashion guru—well, I do but I'm trying to make them less often. Nevertheless, I'm going out on a limb to say it's not a good look, the brain-down-the-back. As the maniacally detached Stacey London delights in explaining to her victims on the Learning Channel's What Not to Wear: If you're going to hang on to a style in hopes it'll come back into fashion, do quickly check to make sure that it ever was in fashion to begin with.

Sorry, I'm being arch; not quite sure how else to react, to be honest. The Mütter Museum of medical anomalies at the venerable College of Physicians of Philadelphia is well supplied with helpful staff and airy colonnades, but what it could really use is a little stack of printed leaflets explaining to the modern visitor how he or she is supposed to feel about all this, or at least what to make of it: the uprooted genitalia and beach-ball tumors, the skeleton of the man whose muscle has turned to bone, the woman so fat that after death her body transformed itself into soap, the embryos in jars whose peeling labels break the sad but unsurprising news that not having a skull, or a brain, or a stomach, or any skin, is a state of affairs "incompatible with life."

Nor is it clear, even allowing for the freewheeling chaos of medical science at the time of the museum's 1858 founding, how any of the exhibits would really help anyone be a better doctor. "Congratulations on your pregnancy, Mrs. Thompson. Fingers crossed it has a skull!" "Ah, yes, Mr. Jenkins, it appears you have your organs on the outside of your body; if you'll give me a minute, I believe somewhere I have a cream." More likely, the young doctors of 1858, like everyone else drawing breath in the English-speaking world at that time, simply liked to unwind after a hard day by gawping at the deformed.

A condition known as ectrodactyly can give you lobster-like claws by fusing the digits of your hands.

Which they did, famously, for a reason: They were worried.

The Victorians' fascination with Human Monstrosities got off to a rollicking start with the 1818 publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (The fact that Queen Victoria wouldn't even be born for another year, or be crowned for another 19, only goes to show how desperate they were to get going, I reckon). The horrifying tale of a brilliant doctor who builds a murderous and repulsive monster by mistake, the book wore its moral on its sleeve, or at least in its original subtitle: The Modern Prometheus. These were the early days of the Industrial Revolution. One literally couldn't open the newspaper without discovering that someone had just invented the steam train, struck a match, or taken the first picture. After eons of glacial incrementalism, Progress had suddenly taken off and was dragging humanity to terrifying points uncertain like an awful wild stallion. Frankenstein gave voice to the ubiquitous public concern that the human species, for its arrogant and incautious tinkering with the laws of Nature, might be due some sort of cosmic comeuppance, like Prometheus, who legendarily invented fire only to find himself strapped to a rock while a bird plucked out his liver—which would then grow back so it could happen all over again the next day, if you can believe it.