Great museums of art or natural history are a delight, but museums of parasites, quack medicine and other weirdness are every bit as wonderful.
10 Weirdest Museums You Should Really Visit
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Music Attribution:
“Wizard” by Jahzzar
Images:
British Museum
tapeworm specimin
parasites 1
parasites 2
parasites 3
infected dog heart
stringies
american phrenological journal
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Phrenology-journal_clean.jpg
icelandic phallological museum
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Icelandic_Phallological_Museum%2C_Reykjav%C3%ADk.JPG
penises in jars
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Penises_in_Jars_%28_4890599548.jpg
whale penis
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Icelandic_Phallological_Museum_May_2012.jpg
the penis museum
sore throat
little skeletons
mutter museum
Video attribution:
Rocky’s Running
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m14f3ApSEQA.
* The Louvre, the Smithsonian, the British Museum: All names that inspire reverence. A great museum of art or natural history is cultural gold. But what do you call a museum that highlights toilet seats, quack medicine or gut parasites? Cultural PLATINUM.
* The Meguro Parasitological Museum. OK – you’re out with your sweetheart for a romantic day on the town in Tokyo, and you’ve just had a lovely lunch. Where to next? How about a building full of parasites? The Meguro Parasitological Museum in Japan’s capital city is a monument to the millions of squirming, crawling and drilling organisms that look at big warm bodies like ours and think, “If I lived here, I’d be home by now.” Among their collection of blood-suckers and gut invaders is a 29-foot* tapeworm and a remarkably photogenic preserved dolphin stomach, frozen in time at the moment it was erupting with hundreds of parasitic worms.
* The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. The Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul is now home to several objects originally featured in the late Bob McCoy’s Museum of Questionable Medical Devices – a must-stop for fans of quackery and pseudoscientific horror. Witness the cutting edge of phrenology with the “psychograph,” which was designed to diagnose your mental attributes with pins that measure the lumps on your head. Or cure your constipation by submitting to the electric vibrations of the “Therapy Chair.”
* The Icelandic Phallological Museum. The Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavik might be small, but it makes up for that with laserlike focus: It is a museum dedicated entirely to the male reproductive organ, in all forms throughout the animal kingdom. Dried, jarred and otherwise preserved penises have been curated from land animals including mice, bears, elephants and, yes, Homo sapiens, and the museum also features an impressive collection of whale genitalia.
* The Mütter Museum. Less than 2 miles** away from the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Sylvester Stallone finished his iconic jog in Rocky, you will find the Mütter Museum: the legacy of Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter, who died in 1859. The museum opened in 1863 based on Mütter’s collection of medical anomalies. Today it contains things like preserved slices of Einstein’s brain, a gallery of more than 2,000 objects extracted from people’s throats, and the remains of “The Soap Lady,” who was buried in a place where the soil chemistry encased her body in a soap-like substance called adipocere.
* What’s the weirdest attraction you’ve ever stumbled across? Let us know in the comments and subscribe! And check out 10 Weirdest Museums You Really Should Visit on HowStuffWorks.com!
