Museums are the wine stewards of civilization. They suggest. They exhibit. They pair. They shape memories and appetites.

But why are they often like empty calories, consumed and quickly forgotten? Why don’t more museums make us think by making us cry?

To be fair, sometimes they do. You cannot visit the National Holocaust Museum without feeling a sadness and horror that leaves you teary-eyed with rage. The new 9/11 Museum in New York will likely do the same.

But these are catastrophe museums, thankfully few in number. Far more common are the watcher-warehouses. Here objects that delight the eye, feed our curiosity, or showcase a particular kind of brilliance are softly staged for a strolling audience of admirers.

I’m sure there is a logic behind this passive and didactic approach. Yet what you feel in these spaces is what you experience and in these silent caverns, the highest passion is reserved for the museum stores. True, there are plenty of hands-on science museums designed to excite. They are noisy, fun, and full of life. Still, in their emphasis on childlike-wonder, they are light on adult feeling — except, perhaps, the warm glow of parental satisfaction.

The bigger issue remains. If museums are truly intended to teach us about discovery, humanity, inspiration, aspiration, and our role in the universe— to be both a mirror and a prod— shouldn’t they be less reverential, more fearless, and yes, more emotional? Maybe then we would remember their point past the exit sign.

What does this emotionalism require? I don’t think you will find it in new, interactive, high-touch displays or re-jiggered collections organized around themes or artists. These confuse manufactured excitement with real sentiment. As a starting point, maybe we should forego comprehensiveness for comprehension. Smaller and denser might be better because both encourage concentration—a reality that museum expansionists tend to downplay.

There are many examples of small museums that pack a wallop, but in my experience there are two wildly different examples that make the case best.

The first is the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM), a tiny destination in Silver Spring, Maryland, overshadowed by the behemoths of the Smithsonian just a few miles away at the National Mall.

NMHM, which describes itself as the nation’s repository of historical and medically significant specimens and artifacts documenting the history of American medicine, originated during the Civil War as the Army Medical Museum. Medical officers in the field were directed to collect specimens of “morbid anatomy together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed.”

In a space smaller than most skyscraper lobbies, the collection of infected bones and snub-nosed bullets, yellowed photos, surgical kits, human remains, and period prostheses, make the pain and suffering of the Civil War wounded visceral. Nearby are skeletons showing the various stages of human development, a personal study in the architecture of evolution. They compete with pathological and genetic rarities: a severed leg swollen with elephantiasis, a scrotum the size of a catcher’s mitt, conjoined twins floating in fluid-filled jar. Throw in an exhibit on Abraham Lincoln, featuring the assassin’s bullet that killed the 16th president and the bloodied shirt cuffs of the doctor who performed his autopsy, and you feel both the tenacity and fragility of existence and the discomfort that comes in knowing that only a thin line of good fortune separates us all from the display case.

Of course, it’s easy to get emotional when brains, black lungs, and disease-swollen skulls demand our attention. How about dinosaurs? An easy choice most would say. Dinosaurs, after all, a surefire crowd pleasers precisely because they do evoke a fearsome wonder.

Yet literally stripped of their context and posed in enormous, sterile spaces, dinosaur skeletons in many natural history museums challenge the brain to fill in the blanks, perceive the invisible, imagine what is not there. They are cerebrally ingested, not emotionally digested. That is not the experience at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, Wyoming. With 30 full skeletons, from a 41-foot T-Rex to a massive Triceratops, packed horn to tooth in an unassuming warehouse, the focus is on the variety and voraciousness of a life form that makes visitors feel puny— yet still elated by their own insignificance.

It’s more than their number and density that make these skeletons seem more alive than their Triassic and Jurassic counterparts elsewhere. A short distance away, you can visit an archaeological dig where more fossils are being unearthed. You are standing in a dinosaur graveyard, a huge thrill! There is no need for the brain to fill in the blanks. The dinosaurs once owned this world and as guests in their now parched, former domain, we can— and we do —breathe a sigh of relief that millions of years safely separate us.

So what does this all mean for mega-museums with their vast collections, philanthropic clout, and busloads of tourists? Probably nothing for now. They are popular if not provocative and will likely remain so for the time being. I wonder, though, that as audience tastes and expectations change in every other corner of our lives, will the throngs continue to come? Or will they seek out something else, something that immerses them in feeling, be it joy or dread, sadness or serenity?

The ancient gods of the Western world once had all the answers and all the temples too until an upstart religion with a powerful and emotional story line changed the status quo. If something similar happens to the great museums, it will take more than being a wine steward to save them. It will take a miracle.