Gretchen Worden Mutter Museum

GINIA A. SMITH

Knight Ridder Newspapers

(KRT) - For 30 years, the last 16 as director, Gretchen Worden was the public face and passionate champion of the Mutter Museum. More than anyone else, she raised its profile from a little-known treasure to a tourist attraction with an international reputation.

She did whatever it took to promote Philadelphia's weird and wonderful museum of medical oddities. And she relished the journey, whether it meant writing books and making documentaries - or menacing David Letterman on national television with a human horn.

Now, 13 months after her death of aplastic anemia at age 56, Worden's friends at the Mutter have transformed a musty storage area on its lower level into a gleaming new gallery in her honor.

"It was her idea to do this, but I'm sure she never dreamed we'd call it the Gretchen Worden room," said Arthur K. Asbury, president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, of which the Mutter is part.

The gallery is a tight 750 square feet, but it seems to embody all that Worden loved about the museum.

It's loaded with anatomical treasures that come alive with storytelling and context. Enthralling or titillating, repulsive or beautiful, they're put out there for all to inspect.

SOURCE FORTWAYNE.COM

Gretchen Worden

Author of Mütter Museum

Gretchen Worden (1947-2004) began working at the Mütter Museum as Assistant to the Curator in 1975, became Acting Curator in 1980, Curator in 1982, and Director in 1988. She was active in the Philadelphia area museum community, having served as president of the Museum Council of Philadelphia, and was also a past president of the Medical Museum Association and a member of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences, among other associations. She gave many presentations on the Museum and related topics to medical and nonmedical groups and museum professionals, and she was a subject in Errol Morris's documentary film series First Person.

SOURCE BLASTBOOKS