On November 21st, Southern Lehigh students participating in the Emerging Health Professionals (EHP) program traveled to Philadelphia to visit the Mütter Museum, a medical history museum showcasing anomalies and diseases of the human body, as well as the ways doctors treat them.

The educational trip to the Mütter Museum, which was founded by a donation by American surgeon Thomas Dent Mütter, has become an annual tradition for EHP students.

“[The Mütter Museum trip] enhances our learning experience by taking the information [the students] are learning in anatomy, and bringing it into a hands-on or real world application,” EHP teacher Mrs. Kristin Applegate said.

Visitors to the museum can view various preservations of wet specimens, dry specimens, skeletal specimens, human models, and medical tools used throughout history. Popular items on display are “The Soap Lady,” which gains its bizarre name due to a wax-like substance called adipocere covering the corpse, the world’s largest colon, and anatomist Joseph Hyrtl’s collection of 139 human skulls.

The Mutter Museum is also one of the two places in the world where visitors can see slices of Albert Einstein’s brain.

“My favorite part about the Mütter Museum was seeing the different diseases and how they affected the different parts of the human body,” senior Amanda Steckroth said.

Another senior, Calvin Hurst, said his favorite part of the museum was the plaster cast of conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker.

The trip proved to be an entertaining, educational, and even a strange experience for the EHP students.

“Human anatomy is the basis of so much to understand in medicine, whether that is in current times or in history over the last several hundred years. So much of what we learn in modern anatomy courses was on view at the museum,” Penn State University anatomy professor Mr. Tom Heilman said. “Some of these displays [are] a bit obsolete, but seeing these conditions of the human body on physical display makes the struggle of the human condition that much more real. We are the same human beings that we were a hundred or a thousand years ago.”

The Emerging Health Professionals program, run by Mrs. Applegate and Mrs. Donna Pavlovic, is a program for students in their senior year who have an interest in pursuing a career in the medical field. Students from over 10 different schools in Lehigh County participate in this selective program. They spend each week rotating between job shadowing various medical professionals, taking an anatomy and physiology course at a local college, and learning basic medical education at Lehigh Carbon Technical Institute (LCTI). Students are also trained and certified in both first aid skills and CPR.

“I think that EHP is super beneficial for anyone hoping to go into healthcare,” senior Alyssia Heurich said. “Not only do we learn the logistics of the medical field, but we are also able to apply our new knowledge to the real world by shadowing at the Lehigh Valley Hospital and St. Luke’s.”