You Are What You Choose To Do Repeatedly

Call me Shrike. They/them or ae/aer. I post a bit of everything. Big fan of textiles, poetry, and history. Most of my posts are queued but I still like to chat. I'm on AO3 as wyrdann104.

[beaft]

common advice for social anxiety is to tell yourself "people aren't going to think less of you just because you said something a bit daft" but the thing is. sometimes they will. and you just have to learn to be cool with that and to treat it as a dnd random encounter rather than letting it ruin your whole day

[vintagewildlife]

"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, being spent on species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?

This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.

[redstonedust]

funny thing about anxiety is sometimes it kind of breaks your sense of danger. like i am known for repeatedly putting myself in situations that make my friends go "bro you couldve died. werent you scared?" and the answer is 👍 yjeah. i did it scared. i do everything scared. i didnt know that was the actual important kind of scary because i usually have to ignore my fears to function in society. it will happen again. watch out.

[ryebreadgf]

once I snorted a fat line of nuance and everything started depending. watch out

[wonderstruck]

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[nylarac]

not to be a pedantic hater but i wish tumblr accent wasn't the commonly used term to describe tumblrina typing quirks and phrases bc that is Not an accent it's a dialect!!

[seimsisk]

what's the difference here?

[nylarac]

accents just affect how you pronounce words

dialects also include grammar (like tumblr users' tendency to not captialize except for Emphasis or ending sentences with commas like this,,,,,) and vocabulary (blorbo, devil's sacrament, #mythis, etc)

[thoodleoo]

reading about the participation of children in rituals as a form of play in ancient greece and came across an incredibly charming story from julius pollux's onomasticon where a flood prevented the adults from reaching a sanctuary to sacrifice a ram to heracles, and the children solved the problem by....sticking a bunch of sticks in an apple to give it "legs" and "horns" and offering it as a sacrifice instead. it's such a charming thought and i can perfectly picture kids these days also pretending at sacrificing an apple "goat" at recess

[thoodleoo]

catch me on the playground playing sacrifices

[enbyzombies2]

[text:

They took a ripe apple and placed four twigs under it, and added two twigs on top— these were the horns—and according to the poets, they said that they were offering the sacrifice of the apple as if it were a horned animal (probaton). 278

/end id]

[ruhlare]

[ruhlare]

[fuckyeahreligionpigeon]

[fluentisonus]

it feels so evil that you can't still access your university online library after you graduate *remembers my principles* it feels so evil that everyone can't access to that stuff all the time

[hollyevolving]

That is very true.

If it's of any help, jstor allows individual users to register for free Independent Researcher accounts with access to 100 documents per month.

[muffinlance]

it WHAT

[zhoudadudugongjin]

Look I love unconditional devotion love stories as much as the next person, but there's really something so deliciously raw about conditional devotion.

I have served you and I have loved you for decades, but I will not give up my principles for you. You cut out part of my heart and took it with you down that path that you insist on walking, but you walk it alone. Even when the bleeding, gaping hole you left in my chest kills me, I will not follow you.

[zhoudadudugongjin]

me everytime one of my seemingly non-specific homoerotic text posts breaks containment

[inthefallofasparrow]

[materialist-scumbag]

materialist scumbag -

The Mütter pulled its own YouTube channel, January of '23. So why were the skulls ever on the wall in the first place?

Okay so the thing everyone believes about the Mütter Museum is that it's a Victorian freakshow with a medical license — creepy doctors just loved collecting pickled weirdness, and Philadelphia kept the cabinet. No. The collection is a contract. In 1858 Thomas Dent Mütter handed the College of Physicians of Philadelphia about 1,700 specimens and a $30,000 endowment — call it a million and change now — and the money came with conditions in writing: a fireproof brick building, a paid curator, an annual lecture, on a deadline. Miss the deadline, lose the money. The skulls are on the wall because a dying surgeon wrote a covenant with teeth, and I think that's the most beautiful thing in the building, including the Soap Lady.

But back up, because the contract doesn't make sense until you know what market it was written into.

cw extreme deformity below the break

Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century was the medical capital of the United States, and I don't mean that as civic boosterism, I mean it as a count of enrolled bodies — Penn's school going back to 1765, Jefferson Medical College chartered in 1824, and then a whole shaggy undergrowth of proprietary schools, which is a polite term for a diploma business run out of a rented hall by four guys splitting the ticket revenue. Because that's what a medical lecture was. Ticket revenue. A student bought a ticket to each professor's course, directly, cash to the man, and after two winters of tickets he was a doctor. No state licensing that meant anything — Pennsylvania's had collapsed, most states' had, the Jacksonian mood being that licensing was monopoly and monopoly was aristocracy, which, fine, it was. So the credential was worth what the school's name was worth and the school's name was worth what its professors could draw.

Which means a professor of surgery in 1841 Philadelphia isn't an academic, he's a headliner, he's carrying the gate.

And Mütter could carry a gate. Jefferson hired him at thirty and he packed the amphitheater — this vain, charming, gorgeously dressed Virginia orphan (raised on somebody else's money after yellow fever took the whole family, there's a whole other post in how many antebellum professional men were orphans capitalized by a guardian's estate, not tonight) who did the surgeries nobody else would touch. Burn contractures, mostly. Women whose faces had fused to their chests because a cooking fire caught the dress — and hold that thought about the dresses, I owe you on it — and Mütter would cut a flap from the unburned back and swing it around and give the woman her neck back. Before anesthesia, most of this. Then ether shows up in late 1846 and he's the first surgeon in Philadelphia to use it, weeks after Boston, because a man whose income is his amphitheater does not let the other fellow demonstrate the miracle first.

The specimens were the same business. You taught from the thing — the wet preparation, the sawed skull, the wax model ordered from Paris at real cost — because the students were comparison shopping and the school with the better collection sold more tickets. A teaching collection was capital equipment. Jefferson's trustees understood their museum cabinet the way a mill owner understood his looms.

So now the 1858 gift reads right. Mütter is dying — gout, lungs, he's mid-forties and wrecked — and he's sitting on a lifetime of accumulated teaching capital that will be scattered at auction the day he stops breathing, the way every dead professor's cabinet got scattered. And across town is the College of Physicians, founded 1787, Benjamin Rush and that crowd, which is not a school at all. A club of the kind of physician who wanted a wall between himself and the diploma-mill trade, and who had lost, remember, the licensing war — the state wouldn't build the wall for them. So the club had to build the wall out of other materials. A library. A fellowship you had to be elected to. And now, for $30,000 and a fireproof building, the finest pathological collection in America.

The club got the collateral. That's what the Mütter Museum is — the physical asset the Philadelphia medical elite borrowed its authority against, in the decades when the law wouldn't underwrite the loan. You couldn't point to a state license, so you pointed to the building. The marble, the specimens, the endowed lecture. Walk a legislator through two floors of catalogued human pathology and the question "what makes you gentlemen different from the botanic healer on Race Street" answers itself, wordlessly, at scale.

Which is insane, a little. We credentialed American medicine on real estate and jarred organs. But it worked.

And the collection kept accreting in exactly that spirit, and every famous object in the place is a receipt from some specific fight if you flip it over. The Hyrtl skulls — the wall of 139 skulls everybody photographs — bought from Joseph Hyrtl of Vienna in 1874, and the point of them was polemic: Hyrtl assembled ordinary named Central Europeans, each skull inked with a name, an age, an occupation, a cause of death, to demonstrate that skull shape tracked nothing — no criminality, no race-science destiny — a standing artillery position against phrenology, which in 1874 was the competition, and the competition was doing numbers. The Chang and Eng material is there because when the most famous conjoined twins on earth died in 1874 the commission that got the autopsy was — well, whose amphitheater do you think? Philadelphia collected the liver like a trading house collecting a famous debt. Grover Cleveland's jaw tumor is in a jar there because the 1893 surgery was done in secret on a yacht in the East River — the country was in a financial panic and a president with cancer would have cratered the gold markets, so they took his upper jaw out at sea and lied about it for twenty-four years — and when the truth finally came out, the specimen surfaced at the College, naturally, because where else does establishment medicine bank its secrets. Einstein's brain slides landed there in 2011 by way of the pathologist who'd simply kept the brain, which is its own whole racket.

The Soap Lady, since you're going to ask — exhumed 1875, a Philadelphia burial ground being cleared for development, and Joseph Leidy paid the exhumation crew for her because her fat had saponified into adipocere. Paid them, the record suggests, by fudging the paperwork fee. The most famous woman in the museum was acquired for something like the price of a good dinner, off a construction site.

Anyway.

Now the supply chain, and I won't be cute about it: the specimens came from the people who couldn't refuse. Almshouse dead, unclaimed dead, and — before Pennsylvania regularized it — the resurrection trade. In 1882 the Philadelphia press caught a ring lifting bodies out of Lebanon Cemetery, the Black cemetery, and selling them to Jefferson's anatomy rooms at a going rate of a few dollars a corpse, with the cemetery's own superintendent in on the take. Somebody's cousin at every gate. The scandal produced the Anatomy Act of 1883, which didn't stop the flow of poor people's bodies into the teaching supply — it legalized it, routed the unclaimed dead to the schools by statute, cut out the middlemen and their wagons. The reform, as usual, was a change of invoice. And the man from Lebanon Cemetery whose name the clerk didn't bother to record is exactly as present in American medical training as Mütter is. More present, by headcount. The clerk just didn't write it down.

I said I'd come back to the dresses, and here it is, quickly: the burn contractures Mütter built his reputation repairing were an industrial injury. Open hearths, whale-oil lamps, and women's fashion in flammable fabrics — the medical literature of the period logs "her clothing took fire" as a routine entry, a thing that just happens, hundreds of times a year in every city, mostly to women, mostly to poor women, because the cheap fabrics burned fastest. Mütter's genius was real. His raw material was the going price of cotton and the absence of a fire-safe lamp. The monster operations were downstream of the dry-goods trade.

Then the whole ecosystem that produced the collection died, on schedule. The Flexner Report in 1910 did what the College's marble never could — got the state and the foundations to torch the proprietary schools, cut American medical schools roughly in half inside twenty years, moved the credential from the professor's gate to the university and the licensing board. The ticket-selling headliner professor went extinct. The teaching collection stopped being capital equipment, because now you taught from slides and journals and, eventually, scans. Every other medical museum in America quietly deaccessioned, rotted, or burned.

The Mütter survived for the most boring reason available, which as regular readers know is my highest compliment: the 1858 contract. Fireproof building, paid curator, endowed lecture, in perpetuity. The covenant outlived the market it was written for, and the collateral just sat there, appreciating into a tourist attraction — some 180,000 visitors a year at its peak, keeping the whole College afloat, the club now living off the cabinet instead of the other way around.

Then 2023: new management pulled the museum's YouTube videos and calaveras merch overnight and announced a rethink of whether the remains should be displayed at all, provenance and consent and all that, and the staff revolted and the goths revolted and half the leadership was gone within a couple of years. And everyone covered this as a culture-war story, the sensitivity people versus the fun-weird people.

But look at the shape of it. A body of physicians, anxious about their profession's legitimacy, arguing that the way you display authority over the dead is exactly what separates real medicine from the disreputable kind. That's not a new argument at the Mütter — that's the founding argument. In 1858 the display was the proof of legitimacy; in 2023 the reluctance to display is the proof; the asset didn't change, the reserve requirement did. The College is doing what it has always done, which is mark its collateral to the current market for respectability.

My bet, flat, no hedge: the Soap Lady is still on view in 2033. The gate revenue is the endowment now, and covenants written by dying surgeons have a way of holding.

The skulls have names painted on them. Hyrtl did that on purpose, in 1874, to win a fight about what a skull could prove.

That fight's running again, and the skulls are still up on the wall, named, waiting to get marked to whatever the market for respectability wants next.

[wovi]

[kittyote]

when youre aromantic you still get dead wife flashbacks but its just about that really fucking good sandwich you ate last week

[muffinlance]

they fridged my wife

[blogofpointydog]

I made a ton of ceramic earth worms and this was the most pleasing way to arrange them.

[hollowboobtheory]

knowing when not to open the comments is a skill

[hollowboobtheory]

internet soft skills

not opening the comments

letting people be wrong

letting people be wrong about YOU

letting people have a bad impression of you (see above)

knowing when your input isn't needed

spotting bot comments

block button

[fluffysheeps]

Bumble sharks 🐝🦈

[pedantic-swedish-bunny-girl]

@catboy-tdick opinion on the bumble sharks?

[catboy-tdick]

WONDERFUL AND JOYOUS….