In the early 1800s, surgery was also a show.

The taxidermied remains of Charles Dickens' pet raven, which helped inspire one of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poems.

Tour the dark and beloved poet's former cobwebbed basement, which may have inspired "The Black Cat."

A rare view of a preserved Victorian science museum.

America's most famous museum of medical oddities is home to the remains of Albert Einstein's brain.

World's first "penitentiary," meant to be humane, drove men insane.

The last of Philadelphia's wood-paved streets is now a landmark of terrible engineering.

The body of St. John Neumann and his collection of hundreds of relics, on display in a Philly church.

This museum boasts a bucket of teeth and tells the tale of a 20th-century dental circus.

The origin of this mechanical boy was a mystery until he revealed his maker by writing it in perfect cursive.

A subterranean shelter remains intact under a busy Paris railway station.

In the best of all possible worlds, everyone will get a chance to see this statue in which Voltaire's heart is interred.

How did a French journalist’s grave become the sexiest statue in the cemetery?

The ruins of a Duke's bucolic dream, where camels once roamed alongside "Dutch" windmills and faux-Italian vineyards.

This Parisian fountain is a little bit fantasy and a little bit nightclub.

The history of radiation is on safe display at the foot of a radiation science laboratory.

Indents in the pavement are all that remain from a grisly death machine in Paris.

Stroll through retro Paris while shopping for old postcards and discarded doll heads.

"In the Dark" Restaurant in Paris offers dinner in complete darkness.

A scandalous Art Nouveau collaboration that set Paris all atwitter at the turn of the century.

A museum on the history of Paris, including a set of Napoleon's toiletries, Proust's room, and relics of the Revolution.

Behind the pink curtain, Au Bonheur du Jour, an art gallery of erotic archives.

A museum of magic with a Sadist past.

France's national museum of scientific and industrial instruments.