Meet & Geek: Fathoming Frankenstein

Meet & Geek: Fathoming Frankenstein is at the Mütter Museum on Thursday, November 12, from 6 PM to 7:30 PM. It's an after-hours program led by museum educator Jo D'Avella, who'll be walking through the science and medicine of the early 1800s that shaped Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the lasting impact of its creation. If you've read the novel, you know how much of it rests on the medical ideas of the time—galvanism, anatomy, the line between life and death—and this is a chance to see how those ideas actually looked in the early 19th century.

This particular session is the finale of the museum's seasonal Frankenstein pop-up exhibit. It goes deeper than the pop-up itself, with bonus collection items on display that you won't see during the day. The Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library, run by The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, traces its founding mandate back to 1787—'to lessen human misery'—and has since told stories of medicine and public health through rare books, archives, historical objects, and biological specimens, alongside the Benjamin Rush Medicinal Plant Garden. It's a fitting place for a deep dive into a story that's so tied up with the history of medicine.

Tickets are $20 and include after-hours museum access, so you'll have time to wander through the collections when the museum is closed to the general public. They're non-refundable but transferable, and photography inside is prohibited. The talk runs from 6 PM to 7:30 PM at 19 S 22nd Street in Philadelphia.