Frankly speaking, most people are interested in many things which are sometimes considered taboo or just something they are a little ashamed of admitting. This is perhaps why materials and sites about murders are so popular, as pictures of gruesome and gory incidents. This macabre interest of many is reflected in some of the world’s museums. The popularity of Prague’s torture museum is there for all to see, as is that of Philadelphia’s less brutal but just as morbid ‘The Mütter’.
Owners and workers at Philadelphia’s most famous museum claim that the artefacts available serve perfectly to remind us just what it is like to be human. Visitors can find over 20.000 specimens of human abnormalities, including a plaster cast of the torso of siamese twins, hundreds of objects extracted from human throats, broken bones and, perhaps most famously, the ‘soap woman’. This is a woman whose body was buried sometime in the 19th century and miraculously reacted with certain chemical properties to turn her into soap.
On a less brutal yet just as intriguing note, New Delhi in India offers us a museum which should be unforgettable to all visitors. The Sulabh is the museum of toilets, giving a compact display of the history of these objects of defecation right up until the modern day. There are numerous designs on offer. The museum does not only aim to make tourists chuckle, yet also targets experts and sanitarians to help them understand the importance of toilets in a country which is still facing huge social and hygiene problems.
On a lighter note, Boston brings us the Museum of Bad Art, where one can browse through artefacts recovered from public bins and donated by the modest artists themselves. There are around 400 unconventional art works on display, making contributions to the glory of bad art.