The famous Mutter Spooky Museum in Philadelphia restores policies on the width of its 6500 human remains

Philadelphia Doctors College, which owns Mutamal MuseumAnd, it has been announced this week that it restricts taking pictures and videos of human remains, allowing it only with the museum’s permission. Photography by the audience will remain banned.

Sarah Ray, director of interpretation and participation, said the museum “will allow photography as long as it serves an educational purpose.” “But education itself is a very wide network that we work.”

The vast majority of remains were collected from about 1840 to about 1940, most of them from Philadelphia, to a large extent the parts of the body and the organs that were beneficial in medical education and were taken during the autopsy or surgery. Such groups were not common among medical societies at a time when the samples were decisive to understand how the body is organized and how it works. But most of these museums have long been given.

The Muguer Museum said it is also working to “cancel identity detection” its collection by looking at the personal history of its human remains to know who they are, if possible, and “do justice” in how to display it and tell their stories. The goal is to show them in the context of the history of medicine, physical diversity, tools and treatments used to treat it.

Museum researchers use a variety of records to collect these dates, focusing on a place and when the remains are collected, but they do not use DNA analysis. In some cases, the museum contains information about the person recorded by the doctor who collected the sample.

“The goal is not to find an identity to find an identity,” said Ray. “The goal of this is to find an identity so that we can build a biographical biographical profile, through which we can ask questions about the way this person has moved to the world. This will look completely different for each sample.”

The policy of the new human remains of the museum says that many “were obtained in unacceptable circumstances, including through strength or coercion” and may have been used in research or in offers that are now examples of scientific racism.

It is believed that about 50 of her samples are indigenous. Since April 2024, nine remains have been returned to a tribe and a group of Hawaiian citizens.

The remains will not be loaned to other institutions, and research must be approved by a group consisting of many of the museum leaders. Research that involves the group tends to the history of medicine, not for purely biological study.

Politics changes follow a two -year review, designed to involve the public in planning the museum’s future. As a result, hundreds of museum videos regarding the elements in the group and on the educational topics that have been removed from YouTube In January 2023, the broadcast service is restored after reorganizing it, with external materials removed.

The museum plans to “sharply limit” its future acquisition of human remains. You will consider accepting them from the main donors of living or through a will but may reject such gifts.

Ashley Davis visitor, 47, said on Thursday that she appreciates the museum’s efforts to educate guests in the difficulties of people and the life they live in.

“I think it is important to know where this comes. These were human.” Davis said.

The museum, which obtained about 100,000 visitors annually, started as a group of surgeons, Dr. Thomas Dent, who donated in 1859 1700 objects and $ 30,000 to hire a secretary and create a fire -resistant building. His goal was to improve medical education. The group now includes more than 35,000 objects with about half a million objects in the associated medical library.

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SCOLFORO from Harrispurg, Pennsylvania.

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