Spring 2008 :: Women to Watch
I am often asked how I ended up as the curator of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, one of the world’s best-known medical museums. I usually just say that “I worked my way up through the museum world,” but my journey goes far beyond that.
From as early as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the inner workings of things. I loved to see what was inside something and why it worked the way it did. Take Barbies for example. I loved the way their legs bent in that semi-fluid motion—and I had to know how they did that. I remember when I was about eight years old, going upstairs to my mother’s studio and finding one of her X-Acto knives. I strapped the poor, unsuspecting Barbie face down, secured her with masking tape, and carefully cut down the leg, revealing a skeleton-like internal structure with a working joint. It was absolutely amazing--and totally worth the trouble I got into for using the knife and ruining the doll.
My parents embraced my quirkiness and supported my love of inquiry (within limits: I was prohibited from any further unsupervised dissections). I received chemistry sets and microscopes for gifts, and unlike many children, I actually played with them. My parents also encouraged me to join extracurricular science clubs and visit museums. When I was in seventh grade, I interned for a paleontologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. My job was to wash dinosaur fossils and glue them back together using an industrial strength epoxy. On my first day, I managed to glue all my fingers together—not the most auspicious start to a scientific career.
A few years later my mother started doing design work for the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine. She would often take me with her to afternoon meetings and drop me off at the nearby Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I still remember her instructions “Do not touch anything and I’ll meet you by the totem polls in an hour.” As I wandered through the museum, I became fascinated with the objects I saw. I realized that I was looking at history, that these objects were once in the hands of pharaohs and kings. I figured that archaeology was the ultimate dissection of our world--I could dig through the Earth and find clues to how we once were. I was sold. I knew this was what I wanted to do.
I thrived in college. There, I discovered kindred spirits. I was lucky enough to get into the Classics House, a dorm for classics and archaeology majors (the graffiti in our laundry room was in Latin, Greek and Aramaic). The shy, quiet, reserved girl I was in high school became an outgoing, exuberant and dare I say--gasp--popular young woman. I think it had to do with finally being understood and accepted for who I was. I didn’t feel the need to hide my “weirdness”; I learned to embrace it with others of my ilk. In fact, I met a classmate there who confided to me that she mummified her Barbies and built little tombs for them. We’ve been friends ever since.
During my sophomore year, I spent a semester on an archaeological dig in Belize. It was there that I excavated my first grave. The bones were so delicate that they turned to dust in your hands. As I carefully tried to salvage the precious bits and pieces it dawned on me that these remains were an even more tangible link to our past then the objects we were excavating. These were the very people we were learning about. As I studied the bones, I realized that they held so many answers. We could learn how people looked, how they lived, what they ate, how many children they had and how and when they died, just from the bones. The bones were the key.
From that point on I was fixated on bones. I spent the summer before my senior year back at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, examining all their skulls from Central and South America. My senior project was on artificially deformed skulls. I was in heaven, but as I traveled around that year looking at graduate schools, I discovered the harsh truth. For every 10 eager, bright and newly minted PhD’s there was maybe one job. I was never one to gamble and I didn’t like those odds.
Then I discovered a way to have it all—forensic anthropology. I could still be an anthropologist and I could still work with bones, but in a modern, crime scene context. I enrolled at George Washington University and decided to train to be a CSI (this was way before the TV show existed). However, a few months after I received my master’s, I landed a job as an osteologist at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. I was so excited, I got to examine bones and I got paid for it. I loved my time at Harvard, but after four years, I decided I needed a change. While I loved my safe, academic cocoon, I felt there was more out there for me to see and to do.
In 2003, I accepted a position from the United Nations Development Programme and the Public Ministry of Peru to teach forensic anthropology and human osteology in Lima, as well as conduct the analysis of some of the tens of thousands of bodies recovered from mass graves all throughout the country. It was challenging, both physically and mentally. I worked 14- to 16-hour days, seven days a week. When I wasn’t teaching or preparing for classes, I was analyzing skeletons in a makeshift morgue in a suite of rooms in a large museum. Nothing can prepare you for walking into a room filled with hundreds of body bags. It goes beyond the sight or the smell, it is the knowledge that there is a person in that bag who was once alive and who has a family waiting for him or her to be identified and brought back home. It gave me a sense of urgency and purpose that I never felt before--and it pushed me to my limits.
When I retuned home I was completely burnt out., I took some time off to take stock and recuperate. I knew I had skills that could take me in different directions, academic or forensic, but I loved both and I didn’t know how to choose.
Then, in spring 2004, a friend told me of a position opening at the Mütter Museum, a museum of medical history, as well as a repository for some of the world’s most interesting medical oddities. I had visited the museum many times growing up, and it was one of my favorite places. I applied immediately and a few weeks later, I began my career at the Mütter as the assistant collections manager. Last year I assumed the position of curator.
This is my dream job because it combines my love of bones, my academic and research inclinations as well as my love of education. There is never a dull day here. I’ve given a tour to Marilyn Manson, chatted with former surgeon general C. Everett Koop and driven a tombstone to the museum in the back of my Subaru. I travel to give lectures, teach all-day forensic seminars and give television and radio interviews. I have sword swallowers and world renowned medical researchers in my Rolodex. And while I am still no stranger to 14-hour days, I feel lucky to be doing something I love. I’ve traveled a long way to find my place--and I couldn’t be happier.
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