New York Times writer Randy Kennedy takes an idiosyncratic tour of Philadelphia -- and stumbles across something I wish I had known about when I lived there:

...my first stop, after stepping off the train in 30th Street Station on Monday morning, was a real outlier: a tiny, hidden museum that interested me not because of new art--most of its pieces are well over a century old--but because of the obsessive nature it shares with so many places in the city, the sense that it exists only because its founders felt a necessity borne of fascination. Located on the grounds of a cemetery in the suburb of Drexel Hill, the Museum of Mourning Art--a name to make Edward Gorey proud--is a compilation of American and European funerary art and artifacts from several private collections, assembled by the family that has owned the cemetery for generations.

The small, haunting, very serious collection includes an ornate horse-drawn hearse from 1890, parked over a coffin made in 1610 with an oval window in the lid so--as the museum's curator, Elizabeth Wojcik, explained--one could make the sure the deceased was good and deceased, and so the soul had an easy means of egress.

Housed in a reproduction of Mount Vernon, the museum centers on the profusion of objects (broaches, ribbons, books, paintings, embroidery) that were produced in the wake of the prolonged period of mourning after Washington's death. And its highlight is one of a small number of mourning rings ordered to be made by Washington's will, with a small glass oval lined with seed pearls and filled with gray strands of the president's hair. The museum's visitors--tours are by appointment--run the gamut from historians to artists to student undertakers to those who simply seem to be drawn to things deathly. (I was there that morning with two local artists and jewelry designers interested in mourning jewelry.)

"There's a woman who comes in a lot," said Ms. Wojcik, pointing out a gorgeous 1797 memorial embroidery, "and stands in front of this work and looks at the weeping willows in it and just cries and cries."

In Covent Garden, I found a small gold mourning brooch, with brown hair under glass, engraved on the back with the year 1828. I think I paid L15 for it, and the vendor, bemused by how inordinately thrilled I was with this unwearable piece of Georgian swag, threw in an old blue velvet-lined leather box to keep it in. In the Portobello Road, I found a bigger, grander Victorian variant, with more hair behind more glass, braided, and bordered with seed pearls. I had to have it--probably because I absolutely did not need to have it. Then, in a funny little medical antiques shop in Mayfair, I found three Victorian glass eyes, two brown and one blue, for, I think, L20 each. They were creepy and beautiful at once--sharp curved lenses designed to sit on top of the vacant space where one's eye had once been, replete with gorgeously translucent irises and tiny red threads to delicately indicate just the right amount of bloodshot. Carried away with visions of Mr. Venus' shop, I bought them all, gave two as presents, and kept the last as a treasure in the battered blue leather box alongside the mourning brooches. And there they live to this day, having come out to play only a few times, when I brought them to school to show the students in my Victorian novel classes. I think I would have loved that museum.

One comparably peculiar museum classic that the author does not mention--but that any visitor to Philly should visit: the Mutter Museum. Situated on the site of the old Philadelphia College of Physicians, it's filled with artifacts once housed in the educational medical museum in the city that used to be the medical capital of the United States: skulls of criminals and syphilitics; skeletons of giants and dwarves; drawers filled with strange things people have swallowed; beautiful wax models of nerves and veins; the conjoined liver of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese Twins, swimming in a vat; and, most challengingly, jar after jar of anomalous births, bobbing in preservative fluid.

It sounds like a freak show--but it is just the opposite. It's filled with objects doctors used to study their craft and deepen their knowledge in the days before it was possible to reproduce photographs in books. In each object lies a history of medicine's emergence during the nineteenth century as a genuinely knowledgeable modern science as well as a history of forgotten individuals (the poor, the criminals, the deformed) so disconnected from the world that when they died no one came forward to bury them--and their bodies went to doctors instead of to the grave. It's a haunting and wonderful place.

UPDATE: Penn is putting a wonderful twist on the tired "freshman reading project" concept this year--and using Philadelphia's fascinating history as a center of American medical history to anchor it.