So I'm over at the university library, taking a quick meeting, and on the way out I browse the new acquisitions…and there is this new book about the Mütter Museum. Darn it. Now I've just spent an hour browsing rapturously through the thing.

For those who don't know, the Mütter Museum is a Philadelphia institution that houses the collections of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It's an amazing and macabre place with a 19^th century feel. It is not a tourist attraction for the faint of heart. I took my kids there once; they were simultaneously repelled and fascinated.

The book is an assortment of strange photographs of medical oddities and tragedies, sometimes posed in peculiar and artful ways, and I think I may have to get a copy for myself.

Here's the kind of thing the book illustrates: a case of cephalothoracopagus, or conjoined twins fused at the head and thorax.