Gretchen Worden: Mutter Museum director

"Oh, my God, you guys! This ovarian cyst is larger than the last one," Sarah McCabe, a sophomore at the University of Delaware, called out to her fellow nursing students while examining specimens in the Gretchen Worden Gallery at the Mutter Museum.

While the nurses-to-be gathered to stare at the beach-ball-size cyst, a portrait of the gallery's eponym presided over the gawking students. Worden would have been pleased.

Until her death in 2004 from aplastic anemia at age 56, Worden was the director of the Mutter Museum and Historical Medical Library. She began as a part-timer in 1974 and worked her way up the ranks at the museum that she loved, assuming the top job in 1988.

The Mutter wouldn't be the must-see attraction that it is today without her guidance. In the '80s, about 5,000 people a year came to see the museum's medical oddities. This year, the museum is on track to host more than 120,000 visitors.

Throughout her career, Worden worked tirelessly to maintain the collection and promote it while similar collections were being sold off. She created the popular Mutter calendar, which led to stints on the late-night TV couch chatting up David Letterman.

In one such appearance, she showed Letterman a lithotrite, an instrument used to crush bladder stones. "There are two ways to get into the male bladder. One is surgical, one isn't," Worden told Letterman, explaining how the lithotrite is inserted into the urethra, then opened up to crush the stone. Letterman squirmed.

In a portrait of Worden painted in 2008 by Alexandra Tyng, the museum director holds the lithotrite, with two of Worden's favorite specimens - skeletons of a giant and a dwarf - behind her. But what really draws you into the portrait is Worden's face. It's both mischievous and serene, a look that J Nathan Bazzel, director of communications for the College of Physicians and a longtime friend of Worden's, knows well.

"She would give a look that was almost a devilish smirk, and half-puckish grin, but there was also a serious side with a glint in her eye," Bazzel said. "She was the only person who could hit three of those points."

Bazzel said that Worden's work pervaded her life. For example, she remained friends with family members of famed conjoined twins Chang and Eng, whose liver is at the museum.

"Her love of her work was immense, and it was not a job to her in that sense, it was a love," Bazzel said about Worden. "It was a passion."

MORE GREAT DAMES: In the back corner of the lower gallery at the Mutter Museum is a case featuring Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-and-blind American child to learn language. Helen Keller's education would later be modeled after Bridgman's training.

Mutter Museum, 19 S. 22nd St., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily, $14 for adults, $10 for seniors, students, military and children 6 to 17, under 6 free.