Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
6 More Museums
International Museum of Surgical Science
This
unintentionally macabre shrine to medicine is my pick for the weird-
est tourist attraction in town. Not for the faint of stomach, it occu-
pies a historic 1917 Gold Coast mansion designed by the noted
architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, who modeled it after Le Petit
Trianon at Versailles. Displayed throughout its four floors are surgi-
cal instruments, paintings, and sculptures depicting the history of
surgery and healing practices in Eastern and Western civilizations
(it's run by the International College of Surgeons). The exhibits are
old-fashioned (no interactive computer displays here), but that's part
of the museum's odd appeal.
You'll look at your doctor in a whole new way after viewing the
trephined skulls excavated from an ancient tomb in Peru. The
accompanying tools bored holes in patients' skulls, a horrific practice
thought to release the evil spirits causing their illness (some skulls
show signs of new bone growth, meaning that some lucky headache-
sufferers actually survived the low-tech surgery). There are also bat-
tlefield amputation kits, a working iron-lung machine in the polio
exhibit, and oddities such as a stethoscope designed to be trans-
ported inside a top hat. Allow 1 hour.
1524 N. Lake Shore Dr. (between Burton Place and North Ave.).
&
312/642-6502.
www.imss.org. Admission $8 adults, $4 seniors and students. Tues-Sat 10am-4pm;
May-Sept Sun 10am-4pm. Closed major holidays. Bus: 151.
Finds
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Three years after the 1886
Haymarket Riot, a young woman named Jane Addams bought a
mansion on Halsted Street that had been built in 1856 as a “coun-
try home” but was surrounded by the shanties of poor immigrants.
Here, Addams and her co-worker, Ellen Gates Starr, launched the
American settlement-house movement with the establishment of
Hull House, an institution that endured on this site in Chicago until
1963. Of the original settlement, what remain today are the Hull-
House Museum, the mansion itself, and the residents' dining hall,
snuggled among the ultramodern, poured-concrete buildings of the
university campus. Inside are the original furnishings, Jane Addams'
office, and numerous settlement maps and photographs. Rotating
exhibits re-create the history of the settlement and the work of its
residents, showing how Addams was able to help transform the dis-
mal streets around her into stable inner-city environments worth
fighting over. Allow a half-hour.
