collection began as a teaching tool for young physicians. Just prior to Mütter's death in 1859, he donated 1,344 items to the American College of Physicians in Philadelphia, along with a $30,000 endowment for the maintenance and expansion of his museum. Mütter's collection was added to ninety-two pathological specimens collected by Doctor Isaac Parrish between 1849 and 1852. The Mütter Museum began to collect antique medical equipment in 1871, including Benjamin Rush's medical chest and Florence Nightingale's sewing kit. In 1874 the museum acquired one hundred human skulls from Austrian anatomist and phrenologist, Joseph Hyrtl (1810–1894); a nineteenth-century corpse, dubbed the "soap lady"; the conjoined liver and death cast of Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siamese twins; and in 1893, Grover Cleveland's jaw tumor. The Mütter Museum is an excellent example of a nineteenth-century grotesque cabinet of medical curiosities. P. T. Barnum established Barnum's American Museum on five floors in New York, "perpetuating into the 1860s the Wunderkammer tradition of curiosities for gullible, often slow-moving throngs—Barnum's famously sly but effective method of crowd control was to post a sign, 'THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS!' at the exit door". In 1908, New York businessmen formed the Hobby Club, a dining club limited to 50 men, in order to showcase their "cabinets of wonder" and their selected collections. These included literary specimens and incunabula; antiquities such as ancient armour; precious stones and geological items of interest. Annual formal dinners would be used to open the various collections up to inspection for the other members of the club. Declining influence By the early decades of the eighteenth century, curiosities and wondrous specimens began to lose their influence among European natural philosophers. As Enlightenment thinkers placed growing emphasis on patterns and systems within nature, anomalies and rarities came to be regarded as potentially misleading objects of study. Curiosities, previously interpreted as divine messages and expressions of nature's variety, were increasingly seen as vulgar exceptions to nature's overall uniformity. Notable collections started in this way Ashmolean Museum Oxford — Ashmole and Tradescant collections Boerhaave Museum in Leiden British Museum in London — Sir Hans Sloane's and other collections Chamber of Art and Curiosities, Ambras Castle in Austria remains largely intact Deyrolle in Paris Fondation Calvet, Avignon Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden Kunstkamera in Saint Petersburg, Russia Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford, England) — Ex-Ashmolean dodo Teylers Museum in Haarlem Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan World Museum in