Bleeder's herbarium

This little garden, crammed in between buildings old and new, has been here since 1937, in honour of one of Philadelphia's famous sons, Benjamin Rush, pioneering doctor and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. He recommended maintaining a garden of 'simples' to keep the medicine chest supplied. Accordingly the garden contains plants such as agrimony, celandine, columbine, lemon balm, bee balm, lamb's ear, rue, jacob's ladder, feverfew, lady's mantle, tansy, pennyroyal, marshmallow, foxglove, lavender, hyssop, wormwood, comfrey, southernwood, valerian, cranesbill, wild ginger, fennel, bugleweed, lovage, spiderwort and an awful lot of French marigolds, seen here.

Rush was a highly regarded doctor and social reformer but an avid proponent of blood-letting to the point of draining his patients unto prostration and even death. He used this technique to treat victims of the disastrous yellow fever epidemic of 1793, bravely remaining in the city when all but the poorest had fled. Subsequently he was challenged by William Cobbett who judged him on a par with "a mosquito, a horse-leech, a ferret, a polecat, a weasel: for all these are bleeders and understand their business as full as well as Dr Rush does his." It didn't help that George Washington's death in 1799 was attributed to excessive therapeutic bleeding.

On one side of the garden is a church and on the other side (on the right in the picure) the notorious Mutter Museum of medical oddities which really should not be missed by the unsqueamish:
There are jars of preserved human kidneys and livers, and a man's skull so eaten away by tertiary syphilis that it looks like pounded rock. There are dried severed hands shiny as lacquered wood, showing their veins like leaves; a distended ovary larger than a soccer ball; spines and leg bones so twisted by rickets they're painful just to see; the skeleton of a dwarf who stood 3 feet 6 inches small, next to that of a giant who towered seven and a half feet. And 'Jim and Joe,' the green-tinted corpse of a two-headed baby, sleeping in a bath of formaldehyde.
I've been before and if I go again I'll be sure to blip the most disgusting thing there - I already know what it will be! For now, enjoy the marigolds.