Murder by Design: Michael Mann's 'Collateral'

DATE August 6. 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Gretchen Worden on medical exhibits at Mutter Museum
in Philadelphia
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, sitting in for Terry Gross.

Gretchen Worden, the long-time director of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia,
died Monday at age 57. The Mutter is a museum affiliated with the College of
Physicians of Philadelphia. It exhibits tumors, lesions, spinal
malformations, Siamese twins and other deformities, pathologies and medical
anomalies. Although it was created for medical students, it also is open to
the public and attracts many people who are interested in observing the
mysteries of the human body.

Gretchen Worden had been associated with the museum for almost 30 years. It
was the only place she had ever worked. And she transformed an eccentric
little-known collection into a destination for thousands of visitors curious
to see its freakish and oddly beautiful objects. In 2002, Worden compiled a
book of photos of the exhibitions. Many of the photographs were taken by
artists who, Worden said, were not interested in conventional beauty but
wanted to explore its opposite: the deformed, the broken, the disfigured
bodies of those who suffered congenital abnormality, trauma or destructive
disease. Worden noted in her book, `While these bodies may be ugly, there is
a terrifying beauty in the spirits of those forced to endure those
afflictions.'

Terry Gross spoke with Gretchen Worden in 2002. Terry asked her to explain
the original reason the Mutter Musem collected these medical abnormalities.

Ms. GRETCHEN WORDEN (Director, Mutter Museum): It began as a museum of
pathological anatomy and it was based on the collections of Dr. Thomas Dent
Mutter, who was a professor of surgery at Jefferson Medical College here in
Philadelphia, 1841 to '56. And at that time it was the way you taught
medicine from actual specimens and models. And so its primary purpose was for
the education of medical students.

TERRY GROSS, host:

So it wasn't uncommon then to collect and preserve diseased organs or to make
plaster casts of deformities?

Ms. WORDEN: Oh, absolutely not. No, the idea of preserving both normal
anatomical bodies and pathological specimens goes back hundreds of years
before that.

GROSS: I guess there weren't really good photographs yet.

Ms. WORDEN: Photographs didn't come along until 1839. That was when the
first daguerreotype was produced and so it was much more practical at that
time if you wanted a teaching specimen to either preserve it in fluid or dry
it out or reproduce it as a wax model or a plaster cast.

GROSS: Now why are they exhibited now? These aren't used to teach anymore,
right?

Ms. WORDEN: Oh, we're still very educational. Only the audience has
changed.

GROSS: Right.

Ms. WORDEN: We're part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which is
a private medical society that was founded in 1787 and it has a tremendous
medical historical library, the fourth largest in the country. And the museum
collection was seen as a complement to the information in the library for the
benefit primarily, when it was acquired by the college, of the members of the
college and their professional colleagues. But the public was always welcomed
ever since it became part of the college in 1863. And it simply is a fact
that today, most of our visitors are from the general lay public, not people
with medical backgrounds. But they're seeing the same materials that were
collected and used to educate physicians in a previous century.

GROSS: I want to talk about some of the specimens that are in the Mutter
Museum. And let's start with a plaster cast of a French woman's head with a
horn growing out of the forehead. Who is this person and what's happened to
her head?

Ms. WORDEN: Actually it's a wax model. The woman, as far as we know, was
known as Madam Dimanche, which has been translated as the Widow Sunday. And
she was an 80-year-old washerwoman living in Paris and she'd actually had some
previous growths of this type. It's called cornu cutanium. It's horny
substance in the skin that starts overgrowing and producing these excrescences
and in this case, it happened to be a spectacular growth coming out of her
forehead. And the model that we have shows it about six inches long. The
reports--there's a published report in an 1851 journal that describes it as
being, by that time, nine or 10 inches long. And she had to support it in a
sack sewn onto her nightcap until she finally got to the doctor and had it
taken off.

GROSS: How do you live with a horn growing out of your forehead for so long?

Ms. WORDEN: Well, I keep telling people--even today, people put off going to
the doctor. And I think we all have a little reluctance. Back then, there
was less that a doctor could do for you so the hesitation was natural. That's
one of the biggest questions. People look at her and wonder how can you let
it grow so long. And I point out that she was a washerwoman, and this is
someone who takes in laundry. She probably was not dealing with the public.
She was a widow, didn't have a husband around to nag her about getting that
thing off your forehead. So I'm just speculating that that's what she did.

GROSS: Now is this a problem that still exists? I mean, are people still
growing horns out of their foreheads?

Ms. WORDEN: Absolutely.

GROSS: Yeah?

Ms. WORDEN: Anybody can develop this. And it can be found in animals as
well, cats and dogs. But as they say, it doesn't usually get that large.

GROSS: Now there's a plaster cast of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese
twins.

Ms. WORDEN: Right.

GROSS: How did the Mutter Museum get a plaster cast of the Siamese twins?

Ms. WORDEN: We had it made, and we had it made because we had just completed
the autopsy on the Siamese twins in 1874. And that really was a great moment
in the history of the college. These were internationally known men. And the
question had always persisted from the first time they started going on public
exhibit in 1829: Could they have been safely separated? And they would
challenge the medical profession with that question. And it was a way of
getting publicity.

And finally when the College of Physicians heard that they'd died, they
realized this is an opportunity to answer that question. And they actually
were able to get the families to agree to have the bodies brought to
Philadelphia, and the autopsy was done in the Mutter Museum at its original
location at 13th and Locust Streets. And after it was completed, that was
when we had the cast made. We were allowed to keep their actual livers as
well, because those were the only organs that were connected through that
band.

GROSS: Are their livers still on exhibit?

Ms. WORDEN: Absolutely, right below the cast.

GROSS: And how are they preserved?

Ms. WORDEN: They're preserved right now in a 75 percent alcohol solution.

GROSS: Huh. So Chang and Eng were joined by the abdomen.

Ms. WORDEN: It was actually--at the end of the breastbone, there's a
cartilage, and they were connected by that cartilage. So the band mostly
consisted of skin and cartilage with superficial circulatory connections
going along the very thin strip of liver tissue that actually passed through
that band.

GROSS: How did they die, and what did the Mutter Museum autopsy discover
about whether they could have lived independent of each other?

Ms. WORDEN: They died because a few years before 1874, Chang had suffered a
stroke, and he was not in as good health as Eng, who was the larger, taller
twin. And so it came to one night in January of 1874 when he was having
trouble breathing and was obviously ill. But they had this routine. They had
married sisters in North Carolina and had families of 21 children, but they
set up separate households in adjacent farms. And every three days, like
clockwork, they would travel from one man's farm to the other so that each man
could be with his family, be the master of his estate, and then they would go.

So it was a dark and stormy night, and they probably should not have gone
because Chang was not well. But he insisted that they go to Eng's house, and
during the night, he died. And Eng woke up and found that his brother was
dead and roused the household, and they sent for the doctor, who had always
said, `If one dies, I will cut close to the body of the dead twin, and the
other one should be able to survive.' The doctor didn't come in time, and
over the space of a few hours, Eng lapsed into a coma and died.

GROSS: So did the autopsy find that they perhaps could have survived had they
been separated earlier?

Ms. WORDEN: There is always that speculation that, had it been done when they
were children, when you have greater recuperative powers, it might have been
successful. But they also discovered that in that band, unsuspected, there
were...

GROSS: The band of muscle that joined them?

Ms. WORDEN: The band of skin and cartilage, yeah. There were slight
outpouchings from each man's peritoneal cavity that contains your abdominal
organs. So the band would have had to be very carefully dissected because if
you get into the peritoneum, then you can get massive abdominal infection. So
the risk of infection was always there. And of course, you're talking 1874,
we're just beginning to use antiseptic surgical procedures. It's 20 years
before X-rays, so you really couldn't get an idea ahead of time what you'd
find. It would have been just operating blind, so to speak.

So the conclusion was that in the best of cases they might have been
surgically separated, but it probably would not have been advisable at any
point because of the risk of shock and infection and certainly more so when
they were adult men.

GROSS: One of the things on exhibit at the Mutter Museum is a giant colon, a
colon that grew to approximately five times the size of an average colon.
What is the story behind this colon?

Ms. WORDEN: It belonged to a man who died in 1892 at age 29. And it's a
congenital condition where you have a problem with the nerve supply to the
muscular wall of the colon, so feces don't pass through normally. And you get
backup of feces, and that's what caused the enlargement of the colon. Today
we'd probably solve it by a colostomy or resection of the bowel, and they'd
pick it up soon after, but we're talking the late 19th century. So it just
got progressively larger as he grew because at first he was able to function.

He had various jobs as a messenger. And at one time, he was actually on
display at the famous Dime Museum at Ninth and Arch Street as the windbag or
balloon man. But as he got older, he was getting increasingly uncomfortable.
So in 1892, he went to Hahnemann Medical College and complained to the
doctors, and they correctly diagnosed it as an enlarged colon. But 1892, you
weren't doing abdominal surgery that could have helped him in any way. So
they took photographs, which we have on display at the museum with the colon,
and then had to just send him away. And he died a few months later.

GROSS: What did he look like?

Ms. WORDEN: He looked like a perfectly ordinary guy, about 5'7", a spare
body, but with this enormously distended abdomen. And when they did the
autopsy, they found that his abdominal organs were practically, you know,
pushed up into his chest up to his clavicle. So it must have been horribly
uncomfortable.

GROSS: So this colon is now preserved in what?

Ms. WORDEN: It was cleaned out, dried and stuffed with a lot of excelsior,
which is just wood shavings. We found old newspapers in it. I mean, it was a
big thing to stuff, so they put in a lot of material. And it's important now
because it's a spectacular example. Megacolons are fairly rare, and they just
rarely get to that size. So it is still impressive even to
gastroenterologists today, and it makes it very clear how far medicine has
progressed since 1892.

BIANCULLI: Gretchen Worden, director of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia,
speaking with Terry Gross in 2002. Worden died Monday at the age of 57.

More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry Gross' interview with Gretchen Worden,
director of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. Worden died Monday at the age
of 57. The Mutter Museum is part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
and was started in mid-19th century to teach medical students about
deformities, disfigurements and the effect of destructive diseases.

GROSS: Now the Mutter Museum was in its planning stages during the Civil War,
and it actually opened at just about the time that the Civil War ended. And
there are several very interesting displays within the exhibit that are
documented in your new book of Civil War injuries, of medical instruments that
were used to treat soldiers during the Civil War. Let's talk about some of
that a little bit. First of all, there were a lot of amputations during the
war. How is that documented? Amputations of soldiers who needed--you know,
had gangrened limbs or other wounds that required the limb be removed. What
kind of documentation do you have of that in the museum?

Ms. WORDEN: The photographs you mentioned actually came from the surgeon
general's office. It's part of what they called The Photographic Series, and
that was documenting Civil War wounds from about 1865 until about 1881. It's
a magnificent document of--photo document of the Civil War. And what they
were able to do is, in some cases, document the initial operation, what the
men look like. And then as some of these soldiers would return to Washington
to discuss pension disputes, for instance, they would be asked to go back to
the Army Medical Museum where the photos had been taken and you could do
follow-ups. So you can actually see what procedures were successful and how
well the men did as a result of amputations and some of the other operations.

There's an idea that an awful lot or that too many operations, amputations,
were done during the Civil War. But in some cases, the doctors have said that
there weren't enough because when you have a really severely damaged limb that
is infected by the dirt, the clothing and whatnot, infection could kill the
man. So the best thing to do is to remove the limb, create a clean surgical
wound that will then heal naturally. And some doctors didn't want to
amputate, would defer the decision from the field hospital to the general
hospital. So by the time the guy had his amputation, it was sometimes too
late; an infection had set in and they would die. So it was done, for the
most part, appropriately.

GROSS: And needless to say, this was before antibiotics, so...

Ms. WORDEN: Exactly. Long time.

GROSS: ...you couldn't kill an infection with antibiotics then.

Ms. WORDEN: Yeah.

GROSS: Well, you also have on display a Civil War medical kit. Talk about
some of the instruments in that kit that we wouldn't see today.

Ms. WORDEN: Yeah, actually, you'd see most of them today. The only thing you
wouldn't see is instruments with ebony handles, because now we know about
sterilization, and to do either heat or chemical sterilization, you need an
all-steel instrument. But the shape of the knives, the trephines, are almost
exactly what you'll find in a modern amputating kit. And I've been told by
some surgical departments that they still keep a case like this handy for use
in amputations.

GROSS: There's a little saw in there?

Ms. WORDEN: Yep. There's a saw. There's a saw for the skull. There's a saw
for taking off big limbs and a metacarpal saw for taking off fingers and toes.

GROSS: Is that how it would be done today, with a saw like that?

Ms. WORDEN: They would probably use an electric saw, not the old
back-and-forth type.

GROSS: Right.

Ms. WORDEN: But otherwise, yeah, sawing is the way you get through bone.

GROSS: Was there any equivalent of anesthesia besides, you know, a good shot
of alcohol that was used then?

Ms. WORDEN: Oh, absolutely. No, see, this is the other point that people
forget about the Civil War. Anesthesia--ether and chloroform had both been in
use since the 1840s. By the time the Civil War came along, doctors were
well-experienced in using it and they, for the most part, had good supplies
all through the war. And so anesthesia was not a problem. They did have
that.

GROSS: What are some of the things that were learned about medicine as a
result of treating all the war injuries?

Ms. WORDEN: A lot of the doctors did become more proficient in dealing with
trauma wounds, because a lot of these doctors were coming from private
practice where you did not see as many gunshot wounds and fractures. So they
would improve their skills that way. There were advances made in plastic
surgery, particularly because of a New York doctor, Dr. Gurdon Buck, who had a
lot to work with in terms of some pretty awful face wounds and made
improvements there.

The problem with the Civil War is it came just before the great breakthrough
of Pasteur with the germ theory and Lister with the antisepsis. And so
whereas in a lot of wars, you can look at all the great leaps forward that
have been made that then become part of the systematic practice of medicine,
with the Civil War it's not so much that case. The great advance there was in
the organizing of the Army Medical Corps and in evacuating wounded men from
the field very quickly and getting them to field hospitals, because wars
always catch the Army Medical Corps by surprise, and so they have to staff up
very quickly by getting a lot of contract surgeons and enlisting them, and
also having to set up a system of the hospitals and the ambulances. So that
was the great advance, really, medically in the Civil War.

GROSS: You say in the book that one of the most popular exhibits in the
museum is a collection of more than 2,000 objects removed from the throats and
airways of patients, such as--what are some of the things that have been
removed from patients' throats?

Ms. WORDEN: Well, the collection came to us in 1924, so there's stuff in
there that you're not going to see around today. Collar buttons, for example,
very popular with kids. We also have a lot of hairpins and safety pins, and I
speculate that, you know, maybe it was a mother holding the pin as she's
diapering the baby. Today you'd have diaper tabs; that's a current choking
hazard. You also get a lot of toys you don't see: jacks--I don't know kids
play with jacks anymore, but they certainly aren't using skate keys, and those
are some of the items. Plus, there's a lot of dental appliances. I think
dentists are more careful now about removing loose prosthetics from the mouth
before they go in. But there's a lot of that that slipped down people's
throats.

GROSS: There's a really eerie image in there--I think it must be, like, an
X-ray or something--of a throat with a little toy battleship stuck in it.

Ms. WORDEN: Yeah, it's an X-ray of a child, and we have the little metal
battleship, and it was successfully removed. Dr. Chevalier Jackson was the
physician who assembled the collection, and it was to be used as a teaching
collection, because for each item, he has the complete case history: how old
the patient was, where the object was, what it was, how long it had been in
there and what instrument was used to successfully remove it.

BIANCULLI: Gretchen Worden, the longtime director of the Mutter Museum of the
College of Physicians of Philadelphia. She died Monday after a brief illness
at the age of 57.

More of her interview in the second half of the show.

I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

BIANCULLI: Coming up, we continue our interview with Gretchen Worden,
director of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia where she worked for nearly 30
years. She died Monday.

We also talk to one of her colleagues, Dr. Mark Hochberg. And David Edelstein
reviews the new film "Collateral."

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, filling in for Terry
Gross.

Let's get back to Terry's interview with Gretchen Worden, the longtime
director of the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
Worden died Monday at the age of 57. The museum was created in the 1860s as a
teaching museum for doctors studying deformed and disfigured bodies and the
impact of destructive diseases and trauma. Its collection includes wax
models, photographs and actual specimens. Terry spoke with Worden in 2002.

GROSS: The Mutter Museum has a whole collection of fetuses stored in jars.

Ms. WORDEN: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: What are some of the medical reasons for this collection?

Ms. WORDEN: Well, it's interesting. We just have redone that exhibit. It's
called our teratology collection, and it's congenital abnormalities or birth
defects. And it's important in the study of embryology and in the study of
how the body develops normally. Oftentimes, it's only when something goes
wrong that you're aware of how it should go right and at what point in the
development. So it's a document of all of the different things that can
affect the development of the child, and it can be the internal environment,
it can be things that the mother has ingested or is exposed to, it can be
genetic, it can simply be a mutation on the gene. It can be caused by any
number of environmental teratogens, and I think there are more of those today
that can cause deformities. So it really gives us insight into the way human
beings develop when you look at the anomalies.

GROSS: And are most of these fetuses--were they mostly delivered or taken
surgically from the mother's womb?

Ms. WORDEN: The older specimens would probably be either natural miscarriages
or have been delivered normally. The more recent ones that we have with the
severe anomalies are sometimes from pregnancies that have been terminated
deliberately because the defect has been picked up on ultrasound or
amniocentesis, and the decision was made not to carry the pregnancy further.

GROSS: Is this one of the exhibits that gets, like, the most emotional
reaction from people or--I'm wondering if it's even controversial among some
people.

Ms. WORDEN: It really, surprisingly, hasn't engendered any controversy
because we have it within the context of the whole Mutter Museum--we're an
educational museum about medicine and human development--it's in a section
where it segues smoothly into normal fetal development, conjoined twins. So
because of that, people look at it as part of the whole display, which is why
I don't sometimes like to have photographs of the fetuses taken and set apart
from the rest of the environment. But people--of course, they're amazed
sometimes to see some of these defects and then they start reading the labels.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Ms. WORDEN: And it's the same with all of the museum. Now I get--sometimes
people react more strongly to the megacolon or to the swallowed objects. You
never know what someone's going to identify with. They either have had a
similar problem or they know someone with it. Some people can't get over that
human horn.

GROSS: Right. You know, one of the things that knocks me out--there's a
collection--there's a couple of photographs that you've included in your
Mutter Museum book of two women with lordosis, which is a severe curvature of
the spine.

Ms. WORDEN: Oh, yeah.

GROSS: And, you know, like, the trunk of their body is about three inches in
front of the rear of their body, and the waist is just kind of like flat and
extended.

Ms. WORDEN: Yeah.

GROSS: So, like, the behind is on one end of the waist and then several
inches later--several inches in front of it is the torso. It's like there's a
flat thing connecting them. I'm not sure if I'm describing this very
clearly...

Ms. WORDEN: Yeah.

GROSS: ...but it's the kind of the thing where you can look at it and you
could say, `That's how I feel some days,' you know.

Ms. WORDEN: Well, that's the way I feel about the megacolon.

GROSS: Right.

Ms. WORDEN: Yeah. Yeah. I'm feeling bloaty.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Is that a typical reaction that people, like, personally relate to,
some of these anomalies? Because even though these anomalies are just very
extreme disfigurements that you kind of feel that way on a smaller level
sometimes.

Ms. WORDEN: Oh, absolutely. As I say, it's--you are struck by the fact that
you're looking at human beings. `And there but for the grace of God go I,'
you say oftentimes and, `Thank God for modern medicine.'

GROSS: Yeah.

Ms. WORDEN: But yeah, it's--and, of course, the fact is a lot of what we'd
look at in the museum and think, `Oh, my God. Nobody has that today,' all
you'd have to do is go into a Third World country or go into rural America and
you will find these, you know, incredibly disfiguring disorders. We are so
spoiled by the fact that we're living in a city that has been a center of
medicine since the 18th century and we've got the best here. But that's not
the way the rest of the world lives.

GROSS: What's one of the exhibits that we haven't yet mentioned that gets a
very strong response from viewers?

Ms. WORDEN: I think that would be the wall of skulls. It's a collection of
139 skulls from the peoples of eastern and central Europe that we bought from
a Viennese anatomist in 1874. And this type of collection was typical of
19th-century medical museums. They would collect skulls of people from all
over the world--and thousand of them--and have them on display, because the
whole idea is compare and contrast, be able to look at all of the differences
between the skulls which you can only see when you see a large number
together.

And what's fascinating is that Professor Hyrtl, from whom we bought it, was
able to record, in most cases, the name, the age, the occupation, in some
cases the religion and the cause of death of each of these individuals. So
you're not just looking at a skull for the shape, as an anthropologist would;
you're looking in a life and you're seeing just a little glimpse of what
people were living like in mid-19th century Europe. You've got your
guerrillas, you've got your deserters, your soldiers, you know, who--from one
hand, they're, you know, bad people; on the other hand, they're freedom
fighters. It all depends on which side you were of the politics.

There is a mother who killed her child; there's a ropewalker who died of a
broken neck. It is wonderful from a sociological and cultural point of view.
So you have this wall of skulls with this very cursory information, and you
can look at it and just kind of imagine, `If you had to summarize my life in
four lines and write it on the side of my skull, what would they write?' And
we that kind of reaction from people, too.

BIANCULLI: Gretchen Worden, speaking with Terry Gross in 2002. More after a
break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's interview with Gretchen Worden.

GROSS: There's so many different ways to relate to the Mutter Museum. One
way is that, you know, it's fascinating medical history. It's a good teaching
tool for doctors.

Ms. WORDEN: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Another is that it's just a kind of oddly beautiful representation of
the human condition, all the things that could go astray with the physical
part of the human condition. But another way of looking at it is it's just
good gross-out fun. Right? And I'm sure a lot of people come to the Mutter
Museum for that reason, that it's good, gross-out kind of fun. How do you
react when people come to the museum for that reason, to point and to laugh
and giggle and...

Ms. WORDEN: Well, I tell you they may be drawn there out of curiosity.

GROSS: Uh-huh.

Ms. WORDEN: Curiosity is a wonderful motivator. And possibly, the curiosity
is a little morbid. But once they walk into that space, they see the
beautiful wooden cabinets and the rich colors of the carpet and the lighting,
and then they start reading the labels and they're immediately sucked into the
whole life of that individual and how it reflects back on your life. So you
don't get a lot of poking and laughing. You'll get some comments, like, `Hey,
come over here. Look at this. You won't believe it.' But that's great. I
mean, because it's wonderful to hear the interactions of people between
themselves looking at these things and just quietly interacting with a
specimen itself. So whatever gets people in the door is fine, and curiosity
brought me in that door...

GROSS: Yeah?

Ms. WORDEN: ...27 years ago.

GROSS: What was it that brought you in?

Ms. WORDEN: Well, actually, I happened to go to church next door from the
time I was eight years old. I had no idea what was in that building until I
was going to Temple University studying anthropology and still singing in the
church choir. And the guy who sang bass happened to be assistant to curator
at the museum, and he told me about it. He took me over to see the museum.
And I said, `If you ever leave this job, I want it.' He left, I got it. So
it was fascinating because when I was growing up in the Philadelphia area, you
always heard about the museum that had babies in bottles and you had to be a
medical student to be able to see them, which, of course, was not true. And
to then find out I'd been going to church next door to that museum, it was
fabulous.

GROSS: Now I understand you keep up with the tabloids to see what kind of
medical anomalies, real and imagined, they are documenting. Is that right?

Ms. WORDEN: Oh, yeah. That's where you find most of the stories about
Siamese twins, the real ones and the fake ones, and they have stringers all
over the world. So sometimes you see something reported in the tabloid before
it even hits the medical literature. And it also is a way of seeing how the
public looks at these anomalies. And the stuff that they will believe because
they don't know any better. You know, Siamese triplets--I'm sorry. We will
explain to you very carefully in our exhibits how Siamese triplets just don't
happen.

GROSS: Why not?

Ms. WORDEN: Well, it's because it's a single egg that splits in two and it
can't split again in three. Now maybe you have some fusion going on, but, no,
you have to read the tabs with a little discretion. But see, that, again,
points out an area where we can help inform the public.

GROSS: Well, Gretchen Worden, thank you so much for talking with us.

Ms. WORDEN: It's been a pleasure.

BIANCULLI: Gretchen Worden speaking with Terry Gross in 2002. Worden was the
director of the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
She died Monday at the age of 57.

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Interview: Dr. Mark Hochberg talks about the Mutter Museum and
about his late colleague Gretchen Worden who died Monday
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

Dr. Mark Hochberg is CEO of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. He
spoke to Terry yesterday about Gretchen Worden and her work at the Mutter
Museum.

TERRY GROSS, host:

When you came to the College of Physicians to be its CEO, what did people tell
you about the Mutter Museum and about Gretchen?

Dr. MARK HOCHBERG (CEO, College of Physicians of Philadelphia): Well, Terry,
they didn't have to tell me anything. When you met Gretchen Worden, you
were--first thought you were meeting Jane Fonda but then you realized there
was a wonderful, warm personality with an incandescent, 1,000-watt smile who
just was immediately engaging. Gretchen had turned this museum into a
magnificent museum that teen-agers love. One of our greatest audiences is
what Gretchen used to call sullen teen-agers: young people who couldn't be
dragged to a museum for anything, except the interesting, medical objects and
exhibits drew them to the museum in huge numbers.

GROSS: Let me tell you a story. After I interviewed Gretchen, my niece who
is an occupational therapist, came and visited me in Philadelphia, and I took
her to the Mutter Museum. And this was a couple of summers ago. I think it
was about two years ago. And one of the exhibits is an arm with smallpox on
it and my attitude is just like a layperson was, like, `Wow, that's really
ugly. It's really scary. It's really fascinating. Like, wow, look at those
sores.' And her attitude was that as a medical professional, she was supposed
to be getting her smallpox vaccination shot soon because of terrorist threats.
And I thought, wow, that's just, like, one small example of the difference
between how a layperson like me would react to this stuff and how a
professional like her would react to it.

And I'm just wondering as, you know, the CEO of the medical college, what your
reaction is to, like, the people like me who are just there to say, `Like,
wow, that's really creepy. That's really interesting. That's really weird'?
It's not the medical professional approach. And I think one of the things
from my perspective, one of the wonderful things Gretchen did with the museum
was really to welcome people like me who just want to see the human body and
all of its strange mysterious ways, even the creepy ways.

Dr. HOCHBERG: Terry, when you tell me this story with your obvious interest
and enthusiasm, my reaction is Gretchen still lives, because that's exactly
what she hoped the viewers would take away on a professional level, on a
layman's level. She felt that these objects, a wax model of someone with
smallpox, had innate interest in beauty and medical importance at many
different levels. And Gretchen wrote in the beginning of her book on the
Mutter Museum an introduction that said one of her goals was not only for the
viewers or the visitors to look at all these objects, but the objects are also
looking back at you, saying, `What is your reaction?' And by describing very
different reactions to similar exhibits, Gretchen has achieved her goal.
Because she saw these innate objects as not only educational tools, but also a
certain amount of beauty.

GROSS: When she got sick, and I don't know whether you can answer this and if
you can whether you'd feel comfortable answering this, but when she got sick,
how she felt about the rebellion of her own body. You know, it's one thing to
be an outside party looking at deformity or at the body in a state of
rebellion, and it's another thing to experience that and to be trapped inside
that body that is rebelling against you. How did she deal with that?

Dr. HOCHBERG: That's a great question. Gretchen was an ebullient
personality but the answer to that question you can only sort of read in her
reaction, and her reaction to her illness was to say, `My responsibility's to
my museum.' She was literally at her post last week, at the museum, despite
being clearly very ill. I think that her view is that illness and deformity
is not an embarrassing, ugly thing. It's part of the human condition. And to
some extent, I think she was able to cope with her own final illness with a
certain amount of strength from the fact that this is the normal turn of
events. It's not ugly. This is not to be something to be swept under the
carpet or to be embarrassed about.

And she was very proud of the fact that, for example, we have the plaster cast
mold of--the death mold of Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins, and right below
the plaster cast of--their death mold is their conjoined liver, the liver
where they were joined. They were--they came from Siam and so that's why it
came to be known as Siamese twins as opposed to French twins or Australian
twins. And she would understand what it was like to live as a conjoined twin
because she actually reached out to conjoined twins in America and got to know
them, and got to be their friends, invited them into the museum. And the
first I believe separation of conjoined twins or one of the first was by a
fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, C. Everett Koop who went
on to do wonderful other things. And Dr. Koop really pioneered this and so
Gretchen and Dr. Koop had this incredible relationship where she would help
conjoined twins understand what it was like from other conjoined twins.

Her friendships are only now becoming known to us. We knew that she was an
important person in Philadelphia, that she had a lot of friends throughout the
cultural environment. But the letters and calls we've been getting are
amazing. For example, she was a good friend of David Letterman's and David
Letterman...

GROSS: Really?

Dr. HOCHBERG: ...had her on his show three times. Now I guess if
you're--being on David Letterman's show once is not such a big deal because if
you're only there once and you don't get invited back I guess he considers you
a dud. He kept calling. Kept asking her to come back. So how did she react
to her final illness? I think she was proud to join the long line of patients
who understood, suffered, but ultimately were ennobled by their disease.

GROSS: What happens to the museum now?

Dr. HOCHBERG: This is still a very difficult and tender time for the College
of Physicians of Philadelphia. Gretchen is virtually our longest-standing
employee. Again, she was there almost 30 years. But I think that her legacy
will be that the museum will continue, will continue to thrive and we believe
she set it on a course that will continue for decades. The most touching
tribute in terms of generation to generation is I noticed this today, a
bouquet of flowers that arrived at the college and, you know, as you might
expect, at the time of death we get a number of bouquets of flowers. But I
happened to notice the card and I was stunned when I read the card. The card
read: `In memory of Gretchen Worden from the descendents of Chang and Eng,
the Siamese twins, who made our great-grandparents come alive for us.'

GROSS: Whoa.

Dr. HOCHBERG: I mean, that is powerful to know that she reached out to the
great-grandchildren of the Siamese twins and, of course, none of us had any
knowledge of that. But this is the kind of person who we are deeply grieving.

GROSS: Dr. Hochberg, thank you so much. And I'm just really sorry, you
know, about her death.

Dr. HOCHBERG: Terry, you're very kind to replay her interview so we can all,
again, hear her wonderful voice and the wonderful impact she's had on visitors
to the museum and your listeners.

BIANCULLI: Dr. Mark Hochberg, chief executive officer of the College of
Physicians of Philadelphia speaking to Terry Gross.

A memorial service for Gretchen Worden will be held at the College of
Physicians of Philadelphia on Sunday, September 12th.

Coming up, a review of the new film "Collateral."

This is FRESH AIR.

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Review: New film starring Tom Cruise, "Collateral"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

Michael Mann's new action thriller, "Collateral," stars Tom Cruise as a hired
killer with salt-and-pepper hair. Jamie Foxx co-stars as Max, an unwilling LA
cabbie who's forced to drive Cruise from one victim to the next. Film critic
David Edelstein has a review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN reporting:

One of my favorite scenes in "Taxi Driver" is when Robert DeNiro's Travis
Bickle seeks out a philosophical cabbie called the Wizard played by Peter
Boyle. To come to terms with his spiritual dislocation, the Wizard says,
`Look, a man takes a job and that becomes what he is.' And he rambles on in
blue-collar existential mode for a while and then Travis says, `I don't know.
That's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard.'

I think of that exchange, both halves, when I see a Michael Mann film like
"Thief," or "Heat" or the new "Collateral" because Mann is the American crimes
genre's most Wizard-like existential philosopher of machismo. In movie after
movie he asks: `What is a man? A thief. A cop. An assassin. That's what
he does. Is that what he is? Is he free to choose or does a man got to do
what a man's got to do?'

Well, Michael Mann's got to do what Michael Mann's got to do and that's give
these philosophical conundrums a throbbing back beat and famously moody
visuals. Men's fashion magazines have followed this director ever since "Miami
Vice," the way he frames his characters to bring out both their alienation and
their glamour. It makes you think: `That is God's loneliest man.' And,
`Where can I get that suit?'

There are two lonely men in "Collateral." Max, played by Jamie Foxx, is an LA
cabbie. He wants to own a fleet of limos, but in the meantime, he brings to
his taxi driver role a superhuman focus. He makes that taxi gleam. And when
he picks up a fetching lawyer, played by Jada Pinkett Smith, he estimates her
travel time to the minute. His next passenger is Vincent, played by Tom
Cruise, a hired killer who's every bit the perfectionist Max is. The universe
has been cruel to him and everywhere he looks he sees signs of its cruelty to
others.

If you think I'm reading these high-brow themes into the movie, listen to
this.

(Soundbite of "Collateral")

Mr. TOM CRUISE: (As Vincent) We're into plan B. Still breathing? Yeah,
we've got to make the best of it. Improvise. Adapt to the environment.
Darwin, Happ(ph) and Zee Ching(ph), whatever, man, we've got to roll with it.

Mr. JAMIE FOXX: (As Max) Zee Ching? What you talking about, man? You threw
a man out of a window.

Mr. CRUISE: (As Vincent) I didn't throw him. He fell.

Mr. FOXX: (As Max) Well, what did he do to you?

Mr. CRUISE: (As Vincent) What?

Mr. FOXX: (As Max) What did he do to you?

Mr. CRUISE: (As Vincent) Nothing. I only met him tonight.

Mr. FOXX: (As Max) You just met him once and you killed him like that?

Mr. CRUISE: (As Vincent) What? I should only kill people after I get to
know them?

Mr. FOXX: (As Max) No.

Mr. CRUISE: (As Vincent) Max, six billion people on the planet, you're
getting bent out of shape because of one fat guy.

Mr. FOXX: (As Max) Well, who was he?

Mr. CRUISE: (As Vincent) What do you care? Have you ever heard of Rwanda?

Mr. FOXX: (As Max) Yes, I know Rwanda.

Mr. CRUISE: (As Vincent) Well, tens of thousands killed before sundown.
Nobody's killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an
eye, Max?

Mr. FOXX: (As Max) What?

Mr. CRUISE: (As Vincent) Did you join Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the
Whales, Greenpeace or something? No. I off one fat Angelino and you throw a
hissy fit.

Mr. FOXX: (As Max) Man, I don't know any Rwandans.

Mr. CRUISE: (As Vincent) You don't know the guy in that truck either.

EDELSTEIN: The dialogue in context is ridiculous and "Collateral" is so
overdesigned that in one scene the gas pumps are color-coordinated with the
cab. But the first half is magical anyway. It's lyrical and jazz-inflected
and Mann can make the flare of a street light, the reflection of the cab in a
mirrored building, even the curve of a windshield seem expressive. Visually,
this is a city boulevard symphony and the script by Stuart Beatie is black
farce, teasing and cruel.

Max is the voice of humanity. He says, `The people you're killing are
somebody's friends.' And Vincent replies, in essence, that `We're all alone.'
Max is right, but Vincent is cooler with samurailike moves. He even saves
Max's life. So for a while, neither character has the dramatic edge.

But in the second half, "Collateral" turns into a series of action-set pieces
that are completely over the top. An existentialist though he may be, Mann is
lousy at action. His framing is too fancy and he doesn't give you your
bearings. So most of the time, you have no idea where people are in relation
to one another. Or even who just got shot. The need to up the ante becomes
ludicrous. Vincent turns into the Terminator, so dedicated to his role, he
doesn't care if he kills everyone in the city. And Max has to prove that
commitment to other people isn't just morally superior to annihilism, it makes
you a better marksman, too.

It's lucky that Jamie Foxx gives a terrific performance. The tension between
nervous deliberator and action hero is funny and against-all-odds believable.
But Tom Cruise, he isn't believable for a second. It's fun to see him with
salt-and-pepper hair, in a role where he can't flash that trademark smile, but
he overacts not smiling. His robotic performance makes "Collateral" seem like
the reductio ad absurdum of a Michael Mann movie, like dancing men store
mannequins spouting being and nothingness.

I felt like Travis Bickle saying, `I don't know, Mann. That's about the
dumbest thing I've ever seen.'

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for the online magazine Slate.

(Credits)

BIANCULLI: For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.