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location: rochester life > featured stories
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Best place to see six-foot man with see-through skin
By Steve Lange
Created in Dresden, Germany, in 1933, the 6-foot Transparent Man centerpieced Mayo Clinic's medical display for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.
It was one of the earliest examples of life-sized, see-through people (in which various organs lit up to accompany a recorded scientific message) and, even today, one of the few transparent men still in existence. (Women, with their non-protruding reproductive organs and pregnancy subplot, were far more popular. Though today there are only a few dozen transparent women displayed in the United States.) Two years later, the Transparent Man, arms raised like he just won Wimbledon, stood in the Mayo Medical Museum — originally dubbed the "Museum of Hygiene and Medicine" — which opened in downtown's old Central Junior High School building. In its 55 years, the museum drew over 5 million visitors to the free exhibit. Bus loads of senior citizens studied things like an old iron lung (the size of a small submarine) and the World War Two pressurized fighter pilot suits developed at Mayo; schoolchildren giggled at the illumination of the Transparent Man's genitalia. At one time or another, visitors witnessed amputated limbs preserved in large glass jars, a collection of swallowed objects (coins, needles, etc.), and scenes depicting farm accidents (including "Man with Pitchfork in Foot"). In October of 1988, the museum, which had been relocated to the first floor of the soon-to-be-demolished Damon Parkade, was closed for good. While downtown businesses, especially hotels and motels, said they would be "devastated" by the loss of the museum's 100,000 annual visitors, Mayo, understandably, did not want to spend patient dollars for the museum's costly upkeep. Private donations did not pour in. So the limbs were packed away. The pitchfork-footed farmer was boxed up. The Transparent Man, eventually, found his way into the Patient Education Center, in the subway level of the Siebens Building, where he greets visitors making their way into the center to reference medical books or magazines or self-test their blood pressure. The nearest Transparent Woman, actually women — female twins — are on display in the Fort Crawford Medical Museum in Prairie du Chien, Wis.
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