Beyond the Glass

Daniel Barnum | Longreads | October 15, 2026 | 4,116 words (15 minutes) This essay is co-published with the literary magazine AGNI and appears in this fall’s AGNI 104. The Hyrtl Skull Collection is the first exhibit you notice when you walk into the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. This is by curatorial design: The skulls face the main entrance, staring steadily at each person who crosses the threshold. All 139 are evenly spaced in long lines behind the glass doors of a towering cherrywood cabinet. Each one rests in a wire frame on top of a thin balsa box with a tag at its center. I recall tracking them with glances as I shuffled nearby with two friends, as part of a large crowd. Small bright lights illuminated them from inside the cases, making them glow dully from my angle. Seeing them for the first time, I was both mesmerized by this effect and intimidated by the skulls’ great number. I tried not to look for too long, but the density of people on the narrow walkway made that impossible: I was soon stuck in the dead center of the exhibit. Almost in spite of myself, I scanned the wall text and learned how they had been brought together to disprove a piece of 19th-century race science, which seemed like one of the better reasons to collect skulls. Most of the exhibits in the Mütter Museum have similarly odd origins. Tucked into a corner of the College of Physicians’ stately New Beaux-Arts building, the Mütter is a 19th-century medical teaching collection/cabinet museum with an annual visitorship of almost 150,000 people. Its staff goes on late-night talk shows with specimens in tow, hosts YouTube series. The gift shop sells soaps and keychains in the shapes of its artifacts. Coming out of a death-obsessed past into an incongruous living present, the exhibits are caught somewhere between scientific exemplar and exploitative spectacle. The museum acknowledges its reputation as a freak show and, in response, doubles down on the meanings of curiosity. Signs we saw at the main gate declared the place’s ethos: disturbingly informative. The text beside the skulls explained itself: Brought together is a euphemistic way of saying, assembled by grave robbing. Dr. Hyrtl dug up a lot of his collection, or had assistants do it for him. Or paid other collectors, other doctors. The graves were attached to hospitals, madhouses, prisons. Some of the people these skulls belonged to surely had surviving relatives, though none could afford or cared to pay for burials and upkeep, and no one has made any claims on them since Dr. Hyrtl sold his collection to the College of Physicians in 1873. The College has the distinction of being the oldest professional medical organization in the United States, and was thus a trusted member of the international buyers’ network for bodies, whole and in parts. I barely recall that history when I’m called in for a job interview. I quickly look up the museum online, which is why I have something to say about the Hyrtl Skulls during the interview. But I can’t keep up the pretense. I begin to ramble about the real reason I went that first day. There was a special exhibit of tsantsa (shrunken heads) on view, reported to be the most extensive group ever brought together, most on loan from private collectors. The Hyrtl Skulls were on the upper level, set opposite the entrance. We looked lost—so a security guard pointed us toward the stairway’s descending brass banister and red carpet. Across from the melting skeleton, she told us. Downstairs, we watched a middle-aged white woman wearing a fanny pack and soft baseball cap peer around curtains and squeal before turning away. We entered where she wouldn’t into a columned salon crowded with the museum’s teratology collection and displays of sundry wet specimens. Fetal variations. Rows of organs jellied into translucence, bound by webs of blood vessels dyed blue and red. At the far wall, the tsantsa were tiered on stands in a wide, purpose-built wood case. There were dozens: small, leathery heads still recognizably human though passed out of identity. The shrinking process had exaggerated some features, vanished others, and blackened the flesh. Many had long, black hair braided with beads and strung with bright parrot feathers. They were beautiful and horrible, familiar and strange. I could not stop staring. Their eyelids had been sewn shut. The poet Mary Ruefle writes about shrunken heads in her essay “My Private Property.” She reflects on growing up in Brussels and regularly skipping school to commune with a particular shrunken head in the collection of the Congo Museum, “that horrific monument of smashed lies and beautiful things.” The ruminations lead her to realize she “wanted to die.” My own day with the tsantsas felt like the opposite: It was initial, not iterative; it was a whole bunch of heads, not a singular one; I was happy, adult, new in town, not alone, truant, or passively suicidal. That first time in the museum, I by no means “wanted to die.” The life I was starting in the city was meant to be the cure for a bad ending, a bad boyfriend. For being a bad boyfriend. For Boston. When I got to Philly, I could believe that the last years of my life just hadn’t happened and here I would begin a real life in a real city. And even though, when I sit for the interview at the Mütter and have cause to answer the question Have you ever been here before?, I do indeed want to die, I am not, despite all my wanting, dead yet, so I need the job. They were beautiful and horrible, familiar and strange. I could not stop staring. Their eyelids had been sewn shut. Needing the job came from wanting to die. A month earlier, I quit the copy shop where I worked since coming to Philly. There, weeks earlier again, an unknown number with an area code I recognize—Tucson, Arizona’s—comes over my phone while I’m at the counter sending a fax. The call I’m expecting from my aunt. It’s been 15 years or more since we last spoke, and longer since we saw each other. She found me online and emailed late at night, while I was sleeping. I arrive for my shift, log onto a work computer—it’s a little before noon—and her note is waiting: Danny, I have to talk to you about something. Please send me your number. I type it into the message bar, then work keeps me distracted for the next few hours. The fax goes through. I charge the guy $4.27 and he calls me a criminal. I tell my boss, I’m gonna take off for a sec, then cross the counterline, snake between the customers, and open the door. Outside, I walk the block, not ready for the call. My mom’s family has been estranged my whole life and generations back before that. Growing up, hearing stories, it felt odd that any of my people should have found each other to begin with. They were from all over the map. Most were fleeing unimaginable things. They never stayed together, barely knew each other to begin with. Brothers, husbands, mothers, children, grandparents—all were lost again and again in life, and then in death. Was grief resounding? Some stories my mother told me about her childhood made her very sad (an angry father gone, her spine turning in on itself, the inheritable tragedy of her psyche), but many were happy. Her sister fit somewhere in the middle. I met her only a few times I could ever remember, and knew her best by her semi-regular phone calls with my mom, though I heard only my mother’s end of those conversations and was young when the two were still on speaking terms. What I knew of her was mostly my mom’s eye rolls, the gesture of her fingers forming a gun against her forehead and her deadpan expression as she cocked her thumb and pulled the trigger. This would make me laugh so loudly my aunt would ask, What’s so funny?—or so I supposed, hearing my mom’s response: Nothing. He’s watching a movie. I thumb the buttons on the side of my phone crossing the street to the main quad of campus. A spot appears on the open lawn, half under a plane tree’s shade and a bit beyond the arcs of a frisbee thrown between three people. I sit down. I know what this call will be, what she has to tell me. Though I feel certain, I hope for the best, or at least that she’ll deliver a line I’ve heard before: My mom is in the hospital, she’s in a psych ward, she’s in jail. No. I call my aunt, and after quick, strained How are yous, she confirms my worst thoughts in swift, worsening terms. Your mom is dead. She was murdered, and soon, Threw her body in a dumpster. After all the other details she knows: A month ago. She has waited a month to find me, to tell me. She cannot explain why. We don’t have much more to talk about. I make a plan to check in over the next few days about coming out for the memorial they’re holding where my grandma lives in New Mexico. We already had two here in Tucson, she tells me. I say, Okay, gotta go, and lie down in the grass. For three days I lie in bed, alternating between barely being able to move and being violently wracked with sobs. I toss back and forth between the numbness of certainty—of believing I knew before I heard—and supernatural disbelief. I wail like the wounded animal I am. On the third day, it’s my birthday. I ask for a new world. My boyfriend and my housemate take me to the trails through the forest above the little cliffs along the Wissahickon. The bright August light comes through the trees on the top of a rise, and my boyfriend takes my picture, but I have no awareness of this until the film comes back. I spend the hike trying to smile whenever I realize someone is looking at me, or, short of that, trying very hard not to cry. In my sunglasses, slumped into my boyfriend’s shoulder in the backseat on the way home, I feel like Bernie in Weekend at Bernie’s. Like the actor playing Bernie.