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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge: Naked World
Chunky Chinese
A growing number of spoiled only children are obese, and may face diminished future sex lives because of it.
By Jack Boulware
[04/10/00]

Urge
The man who made gays macho
A new book about Tom of Finland says the artist was the first to show homosexual masculinity.
By Michael Alvear
[04/08/00]

Column
Disaster drill
Where's the virile firefighter who's supposed to cut off my clothes?
By Mary Roach
[04/07/00]

Urge: Naked World
Scam fails for hooker-to-be felled by oil
Judge doesn't fall for woman's claim.
By Jack Boulware
[04/07/00]

Urge: Naked World
Panty raid
City manager goes bonkers and defaces billboard.
By Jack Boulware
[04/06/00]

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Back then, Cleveland had just been elected to his second, albeit nonconsecutive, term mostly because he wanted to make sure the country stayed on the gold standard. His vice president, Adlai Stevenson, was a silver man. So when doctors found Cleveland's cancer, they took him out on a yacht on Long Island Sound and told everyone he had a toothache -- just so Stevenson wouldn't seize power because of a medical emergency.

The ruse went undiscovered until 24 years later, when Dr. W.W. Keen, a Philadelphia doctor who had been on the surgical team, produced the tumor and told the dirty cancerous secret.

The jellied little Cleveland tumor is but one of a veritable midway of medical oddities and artifacts at the Mütter Museum,, a gothic little joint housed in the otherwise august American College of Physicians at a busy commercial corner in Center City Philadelphia.

With its walls of skulls and cabinets of distended fetuses -- not to mention the 3-foot-wide piece of colon and the 8-inch-long human horn taken off a 70-year-old woman -- the Mütter is what you might get if you crossbred C. Everett Koop with Charles Addams. Being squeamish, I'd always avoided the place like the plague but now as middle age set in, I decided it was time for a visit. Maybe growing old was compelling me to pay homage to the magic of medicine. Or maybe I just wanted to see bodies that looked worse than me.

Next page | "Siamese" twins and pickled fetuses