Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine by Cristin O’Keefe Atowicz (review)

In Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine, writer and poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz seeks to bring to life the man behind Philadelphia’s famous Mütter Museum. Through Thomas Dent Mutter, who was born in Virginia in 1807, Aptowicz reveals a life at the intersection of mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia and a career navigated through the changing tides of medical education, patient care, and surgical technology. Despite Mütter’s standing in the city, groundbreaking surgeries, and advanced ideas of medicine, his achievements have largely disappeared from history books. In this, the first extensive biography to focus on the surgeon, Aptowicz illuminates Mütter’s education and career and, more broadly, weaves a story of the suffering, conflict, and possibility of antebellum Philadelphia and medicine that engages both a general audience and specialized readers.

To chronicle Mütter’s world, the biography is divided into three parts that follow a roughly chronological path. Part 1 provides an overview of Mütter’s early life and introduces the state of American medicine in the early nineteenth century. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Mütter sojourned to Paris where he was introduced to “les opérations plastiques” and developed a good reputation amongst preeminent French surgeons. He returned to Philadelphia in less than a year and struggled to build a surgical practice until he was offered a position at Jefferson Medical College. Established in 1824 and the first American medical school to also have a collegiate clinic, it was an ideal place for Mütter to perform surgeries on Philadelphia’s most hopeless patients. Elected chair of surgery in 1838, he fostered a growing reputation for careful and successful surgeries, engaging teaching, and a willingness to accept the newest medical advancements.

Part 2, focusing on the 1840s, covers the most dynamic part of Mütter’s career and the college’s development. Mütter’s radical and reconstructive surgeries increased the college’s and his own renown, and his relatively high success rate was due to his advanced, and seemingly instinctual, approach to patient care that emphasized patience, compassion, and cleanliness. In 1846 Mütter performed the first surgery using the controversial ether anesthesia in Philadelphia. It was Mütter’s demanding schedule of teaching, performing surgery, and caring for patients at the clinic that led to his physical deterioration and eventual death in 1859 at the age of forty-eight.

In part 3, Aptowicz focuses on Mütter’s legacy. Before his death, Mütter painstakingly negotiated the care of his collection with the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Because of his demanding teaching and surgical schedule, he did not devote a great deal of time to writing and publishing, which is how many of his contemporaries fostered their reputation. Despite this deficiency in nineteenth-century standards, Aptowicz emphasizes that his legacy instead “lives on in the surgical techniques he created and which are still being used today; in the innovation and institutions created by the young men who learned from him what it meant to be a good physician; and in his namesake museum” (301).

Though focusing largely on Mütter, Aptowicz richly describes the people and places around him by using his life and career to emphasize other issues and controversies of nineteenth-century Philadelphia and medicine. Mining through a variety of sources including personal writings, newspapers, journals, and images, Aptowicz skillfully recreates the realities of life and medicine in mid-century Philadelphia. Moreover, she highlights attitudes toward women and the city’s poor, their lives, and their health. Aptowicz reveals how Mütter was able to surgically repair people considered monstrous, even to medical professionals, particularly those disfigured by fires or matchstick girls whose occupations had disfigured...