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Copyright © 2014 by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Aptowicz, Cristin O’Keefe, author.
Dr. Mütter’s marvels : a true tale of intrigue and innovation at the dawn of modern medicine / by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-698-16210-5
I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Mütter, Thomas D. (Thomas Dent), 1811-1859. 2. Mütter Museum. 3. General Surgery—Pennsylvania—Biography. 4. Physicians—Pennsylvania—Biography. 5. General Surgery—history—Pennsylvania. 6. History, 19th Century—Pennsylvania. 7. Museums—history—Pennsylvania. 8. Pathology—history—Pennsylvania. WZ 100]
RD27.35.D74
617.092—dc23
[B]
2014014747
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Art Works.
Version_1
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Prologue
—— PART ONE——
CHAPTER ONE
Monsters
CHAPTER TWO
The City of Brotherly Love
CHAPTER THREE
To Render Evil More Endurable
CHAPTER FOUR
The Medical Athens of America
CHAPTER FIVE
A Falcon Flight
CHAPTER SIX
Ce Que Femme Veut, Dieu le Veut Aussi!
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Great Thaw
CHAPTER EIGHT
The New Jefferson Medical College
CHAPTER NINE
The Right Arm of the College
—— PART TWO——
CHAPTER TEN
Dwell Not Then upon What Has Been Done
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Root of the Trouble
CHAPTER TWELVE
The World to Come
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Women Who Were Swallowed by Fire
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
To Unmake Monsters
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
To Remedy Evils
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Gentlemen, This Is No Humbug
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Advent
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
All the Fair Daughters of Eve
CHAPTER NINETEEN
If I May but Touch His Garment, I Shall Be Whole
—— PART THREE——
CHAPTER TWENTY
These Deeds of Blood
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
That Bourne from Which No Traveler Returns
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Rich Fruits of Life’s Labors
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Voices of the Illustrious Dead
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Look to God for Pardon
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
While There Is Life, There Is Hope
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Leave Nothing Undone
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The World Is No Place of Rest
Acknowledgments
Notes and Sources
Image Credits
Index
About the Author
Thomas Dent Mütter
PROLOGUE
Thomas Dent Mütter is dead and the world will forget him.
That is what Richard J. Levis thought, feared really, the day he heard the news. Mütter’s death should not have come as a surprise. In his last years, he was a man who struggled to keep the demons of his ill health at bay. And though he worked hard to make sure his ambitious surgeries, his quick wit, and his charmingly ostentatious style of dress were always center stage, even Mütter couldn’t hide how broken his body had become by the endless torture of pain and disease, the same foes he battled his entire career. Perhaps that was why it was still a shock when he finally succumbed to them. Mütter always seemed to be someone who could beguile death to stay away just a little while longer.
Levis had been Mütter’s student at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College. It seemed bitterly ironic that 1859, the year Levis would be named lead surgeon at Philadelphia General Hospital, would also be the year the greatest surgeon he’d ever studied under would die at the age of forty-eight.
Levis remembered walking into the Jefferson Medical College surgical clinic—which Mütter himself had fought to have built—and how Mütter stood at the lectern, giving an ardent joyful greeting to every student as they entered the room. His surgical lectures were universally acknowledged to be unrivaled. Unlike other professors in his time, he always addressed his students in a plainspoken manner, endeavoring to be clearly understood even as his lectures and surgeries became more complex and ornate.
And my God, his surgeries! thought Levis. His ingenuity, his early excellence, the attention he paid to the poor and humble. Would future generations remember how Mütter’s office was thronged with patients from every part of the Union, rich and poor, old and young, attracted by his fame and the promise of his genius, waiting patiently for hours just to consult with him? How the patients in the crowded receiving room at the college’s clinic would gather around him with a confidence and infatuation when he entered, as if to say, “If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.”
And how Mütter made these people whole again.
The broken. The diseased. The cursed. People who were considered monsters, even by medical definition. Mütter welcomed them all. An expert and efficient surgeon, he systematically rehearsed every procedure in his mind before beginning it; each assistant was accurately assigned special duties; and each instrument and requisite appliance was cleaned and laid out before the operating table.
In every view of him, he was a great doctor, even at a time when the definition of what that meant was ever changing, when the path was filled with the poisonous bramble of his critics, obstinate men in power who thought they knew best.
Despite the constant physical struggles that made Mütter’s too-short life blaze so brightly, those who loved him did not see him as a man tormented by the failings of his own body. M�
�tter was a man who embraced life: He hosted lavish parties; spent late nights with students—current and former—drinking cold beer and eating fresh oysters, laughing loudly; took numerous trips across the Atlantic, where he was greeted warmly by the most eminent medical men of London and Paris; and spared no labor or expense in securing the most valuable material to illustrate his lectures, and thus acquired one of the best private surgical cabinets of his time. A collection of human curiosities so strange and shocking that finding it a permanent home would prove to be one of Mütter’s last great trials.
It seemed impossible to Richard Levis that a man like this could ever be forgotten. Yet he knew it happened every day.
Levis brought a fresh inkpot and pen to his desk. He was not a poet, just a surgeon doggedly working in the second-largest city of a country on the brink of war, but he still considered it his duty to craft a worthy remembrance.
“The subject of this memoir needs no eulogium from us, before the medical profession,” read the piece later published in The Medical and Surgical Reporter, “and our humble hands would attempt to wreathe no new laurels for his brow. . . . The short life of Doctor Mütter, illustrated the most remarkable mental abilities, and the gentlest qualities of heart. For years, we have viewed him at what seemed the zenith of professional eminence, and yet he continued struggling under the oppression of the severest bodily infirmities, to elevate the science to which he was devoted and to relieve the miseries of others.
“His life, until his retirement, was one of incessant labor. His lectures and immense practice occupied the day, and midnight found him still toiling. The allurements of pleasure and the couch of indolence could not attract him from his great pursuit, and he continued to be active until unable to hold up longer against his fate, he sought retirement and repose, a calm well suited to the close of a useful life. . . .
“What an epitome of this life it is to know that so much mental activity has ceased here, forever; that the eye which so lately gleamed with enthusiasm is closed; the cheek which glowed with ardor is pale; the voice which rang so loud and clear with eloquence, is hushed in the endless silence of the tomb.”
Then Levis added one final small plea, that his voice not be the only one to recall this bright and brilliant star. Looking into the future, the brokenhearted former student humbly asked that “other and abler pens write for him, to coming ages” so that his idol could achieve the immortality Levis thought he deserved, and to make Mütter “a deathless name . . . forever blended with the history of American Surgery.”
THE MEDICAL MAN MUST OBTAIN A THOROUGH MEDICAL EDUCATION
To secure true eminence, not popularity, not notoriety,
not the distinction that friendly or family influence or wealth may for a time confer,
the medical man must,
as the first and most important requisite,
obtain a thorough medical education.
But I would caution you against attempting eminence
in any other department of science:
“One science only will one genius fit,
So vast is art, so narrow human wit.”
THOMAS DENT MÜTTER
CHAPTER ONE
MONSTERS
Even in the middle of the ocean, Mütter could not get her out of his mind. He excused himself early from dinner, stopped well-meaning conversationalists mid-sentence, and rushed down to his sleeping quarters just to hold her face in his hands.
To an American like him, she appeared unquestionably French: high cheekbones, full upturned lips, glittering deep-set eyes. For an older woman, she was impressively well preserved, her temples kissed with only the slightest crush of wrinkles. When she was young, Mütter imagined, she must have been very beautiful, though perhaps girlishly sensitive about the long thin hook of her nose, or the pale mole resting on her lower left cheek. But that would have been decades ago.
Now well past her childbearing years, the woman answered only to “Madame Dimanche”—the Widow Sunday—and all anyone saw when they looked at her was the thick brown horn that sprouted from her pale forehead, continuing down the entire length of her face and stopping bluntly just below her pointy, perfect French chin.
• • •
The young Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter had arrived in Paris less than a year earlier, in the fall of 1831. Even for Mutter, who had always relied heavily on his ability to charm a situation to his favor, it had not been an easy trip to arrange.
He was just twenty years old when he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s storied medical college. To an outsider, he may not have seemed that different from the other students in his class: fresh-faced, eager, hardworking. But he knew he was different—in some ways that were deliberate and in other ways that were utterly out of his control.
Perhaps the most obvious of these was Mutter’s appearance. He was, as anyone could plainly see, extraordinarily handsome. Having studied his parents’ portraits as a child—one of the few things of theirs he still possessed—he knew that he inherited his good looks. He had his father’s strong nose, impishly arched eyebrows, and rare bright blue eyes. He favored his mother’s bright complexion, her round lips, and sweet, open oval face. His chin, like hers, jutted out playfully.
Mutter made sure to keep his thick brown hair cut to a fashionable length, brushed back and swept off his cleanly shaven, charismatic face. His clothing was always clean, current, and fastidiously tailored. From a young age, he understood how important looks were, how vital appearance was to acceptance, especially among certain circles of society. He worked hard to create an aura of ease around him. No one needed to know how much he had struggled, or how much he struggled still. No, rather he made it a habit to stand straight, to make his smile easy and his laugh warm. He was, as a contemporary once described him, the absolute pink of neatness.
The truth was that, financially, he had always been forced to walk a tightrope. Both his parents had died when he was very young. The money they left him was modest, and thanks to complicated legal issues, his access to it was severely limited. Over the years, he grew practiced in the art of finessing opportunities so that he could live something approximate to the life he desired. At boarding school, he was known to charge his clothing bills to the institution and then earn scholarships to pay off the resulting debts. When he wanted to travel, he secured just enough money to get him to his destination and then relied on his wits to get him back home.
And now that Mutter had achieved his longtime goal of graduating from one of the country’s best medical schools, he focused on his next goal: Paris.
Paris was the epicenter of medical achievement: the medical mecca. Hundreds of American doctors swarmed to the city every year, knowing that in order to be great, to be truly great, you must study medicine in Paris. And that had always been Mutter’s plan: to be great. More than that: to be the greatest.
• • •
Getting to Paris, however, was not an easy endeavor. He knew—as all gentlemen of limited means did—that sailing as a surgeon’s mate with a U.S. naval ship in exchange for free passage to Europe was an option open to him, but competition was always considerable and fierce. Mutter spent months submitting letters and applications to the secretary of the Navy, trying to use charm, logic, and bravado to secure a position. He even implored his guardian, Colonel Robert W. Carter, to ask prominent men close to President Jackson to write letters on his behalf, explaining, “[I] am afraid that I shall not be able to obtain an order unless I can get my friends to make some exertions for the furtherance of my plan.” Despite all the effort he expended, no position ever materialized.
Mutter could only watch as the wealthier members of his graduating class departed for Europe with financial ease. Others returned to their hometowns with their new degrees, bought houses with their fathers’ money, and started their practices using their families’ connections. Mutter remained in
Philadelphia, and his hopes remained fixed on Paris.
Mutter felt his luck about to change when he read about the Kensington in a local Philadelphia paper. For months, the Cramp shipyard had been building a massive warship. The rumor was that it was being built for the Mexican Navy, and that upon seeing its immense size—and cost—they opted to back out of purchasing it. However, the most recent update was that the giant ship had sold after all, to the Imperial Russian Navy.
Mutter saw an opportunity. He went to the Cramp shipyard and asked if the American crew in charge of sailing the Kensington to Russia was in need of a surgeon’s mate. That he was just twenty and only a few months out of medical school was a minor detail. He hoped that being present, able, and willing would be enough. Luckily for Mutter, it was. A few weeks later, he boarded the ship (later to be renamed the Prince of Warsaw by Tsar Nicholas himself), and left America for the first time.
• • •
The ocean was like nothing Mutter had ever experienced: vast and wild and so incredibly loud. He had hoped the enormity of the newly built warship—with its four towering masts and immense spiderweb of rigging—as well as its extensively trained crew would offer him comfort during the weeks at sea, but the experience was more taxing than any book or anecdote portended.
He did not anticipate that whether he was holed up in the bowels of the ship or clinging to the aft railing, his body would be trapped in a relentless cycle of emptying itself. That his stomach would never become accustomed to the rolling blue-black swells of the sea. Nor did he realize how intimate he would become with the ship’s beastly stowaways—bedbugs and fleas, weevils and rats. He would wake to bugs crawling in his hair and mouth, and fall asleep to sounds of the rats chewing through his clothes, attempting to suss out even the smallest morsel of food. And then there were the storms, the nights when he felt certain the vessel would break in two as mountainous waves crashed over it, the ship itself painfully groaning with each hit. The ocean seemed nothing but a frothing black maw, hungry to devour him.
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