Russell is a history-minded former chief of surgery at MGH (Man’s Greatest Hospital; somehow I don’t think they’ll devote a special exhibit to Dr. Stephen Bergman’s blasphemous MGH parody, the gajillion-selling novel “The House of God’’) who assembled some affluent donors, such as Sumner Redstone, Nan and Bill Harris of WGBH studio fame, and a couple of Putnams to build the new museum. Dr. Harris, by the way, could have his own special exhibit; he is an inventor and an innovator in hip-replacement surgery.
The Russell is a handsome, four-story, copper-clad building erected on a postage-stamp-size lot on Cambridge Street, in front of the MGH’s massive Yawkey Center for Outpatient Care. The museum was designed by Jane Weinzapfel of Leers Weinzapfel Associates, who also renovated Harvard’s Hasty Pudding theater and built the new Dudley Square police station.
The Russell joins a fascinating universe of medical museums. London alone has more than 20 medical museums, large and small. The Royal College of Surgeons operates two of them, the Hunterian, named after the 18th-century Hunter brothers, and the Wellcome Museum of Anatomy and Pathology, which houses, inter alia, 2,000 specimens of “malformations, injuries, vascular lesions, infections, primary tumors, secondary tumors, and other sundry lesions.’’
In the United States, the Mayo Clinic operates a Heritage Hall, and Case Western Reserve University has the well-known Dittrick Museum, home to Percy Skuy Collection on the History of Contraception. Philadelphia’s College of Physicians, “the birthplace of American medicine,’’ maintains the best-known American collection at the Mutter Museum, where Albert Einstein’s brain is currently on display.
“We won’t be showing body parts,’’ the Russell’s director, Peter Johnson, informed me when we met last week. Imagine my disappointment.
