Dr. Mutter's Marvels

by Cristin O'keefe Aptowicz

  “When we contemplate our abhorrence of that condition to which the arms and tyranny of Great Britain were exerted to reduce us,” the act began, “when we look back on the variety of dangers to which we have been exposed, and how miraculously our wants in many instances have been supplied and our deliverances wrought . . . we conceive that it is our duty, and we rejoice that it is in our power, to extend a portion of that freedom to others, which hath been extended to us.”

  The act made very clear the position that Pennsylvania legislators had taken toward those who believed that white Americans were—and should remain—superior to all other races.

  “It is not for us to enquire why, in the creation of mankind, the inhabitants of the several parts of the earth were distinguished by a difference in feature or complexion,” the act read. “It is sufficient to know that all are the work of an Almighty Hand . . . we may reasonably, as well as religiously infer, that He, who placed them in their various situations, hath extended equally His care and protection to all, and that it becometh not us to counteract His mercies.”

  However, even with their “hearts enlarged with kindness and benevolence,” the lawmakers believed they wouldn’t be able to free all the slaves in Pennsylvania at once. Hence the law’s name and intent: “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” This meant that all children born to a slave from the date of the act forward would be born free, but slaves still could be purchased or brought into Pennsylvania and continue to be kept as slaves.

  However, for the unlucky soul who was still enslaved in Pennsylvania when the act was passed, it would be left solely up to the discretion of the slave’s owner when—or if—the slave would be freed.

  Because of the loophole this language caused, there were still slaves in Philadelphia for decades after the abolition act took effect. Even as late as the early 1840s, Philadelphia city records show a presence of slaves within the city limits. It wouldn’t be until 1848—nearly seventy years after the act was passed—that the census showed no slaves living within the city and Philadelphia’s emancipation was finally considered complete.

  Despite its Quaker background, Philadelphia was far from welcoming to free blacks, or anyone considered to be “an outsider.” Philadelphians boasted that their city was “a true American city,” citing that it “contained fewer foreigners than either New York or Boston.”

  “The city was not showy . . . ,” a doctor would later write, “its inhabitants distant and unsocial. . . . The hospitality of a Philadelphia gentleman was proverbial, and often alcoholic.”

  “Organized gangs of thugs and robbers were numerous and rampant,” another doctor recalled, “bearing such refined names as the Rats, the Schuylkill Rangers, the Blood Tubs and the Killers.”

  Violence in and around the city had grown increasingly common.

  The ever-growing population of free blacks—who came to Philadelphia with the hope of making a life for themselves and their families—were a frequent target of that violence.

  Much of the anger came from Philadelphia’s large working-class and poor populations, who were easily enraged by what they saw as the unfair competition that free blacks presented in the labor market. It was ironic that the racism that emboldened employers to pay free blacks less money than their white counterparts for the same jobs was also the source of so much racist anger volleyed at them by the white workers, who felt they had been robbed by workers who were willing to be paid so much less.

  Politicians of the time were not afraid to stoke these feelings of resentment to garner more votes. Philadelphia’s mayor was quoted as saying that ninety-nine percent of Philadelphia’s own citizens were opposed to abolition, and soon legislation was created to specifically disenfranchise the freed black men and women, stripping them of rights they had been granted since 1780, when the abolition act was first passed.

  “There is not perhaps anywhere to be found a city in which prejudice against color is more rampant than in Philadelphia,” Frederick Douglass, author, abolitionist, and former slave later wrote. “It has its white schools and its colored schools, its white churches and its colored churches, its white Christianity and its colored Christianity, its white concerts and its colored concerts, its white literary institutions and its colored literary institutions . . . And the line is everywhere tightly drawn between them.

  “Colored persons, no matter how well dressed or how well behaved, ladies or gentlemen, rich or poor, are not even permitted to ride on any of the many railways through that Christian city. Halls are rented with the express understanding that no person of color shall be allowed to enter, either to attend the concert or listen to a lecture,” he continued. “The whole aspect of city usage at this point is mean, contemptible and barbarous.”

  But there were many in Philadelphia who committed themselves to the antislavery fight and, furthermore, to the acceptance of the equality of the races. Philadelphia became the founding home of the American Anti-Slavery Society as well as of the influential abolitionist newspaper the National Enquirer (later renamed The Pennsylvania Freeman).

  Abolitionists had to be creative to circumvent the intolerance of the time. When abolitionists were repeatedly denied rentals at meeting halls around the city because they insisted that both blacks and whites be allowed to attend their meetings, they decided to create a building of their own: Pennsylvania Hall, a large, handsome building they hoped would serve as “a place where freedom of speech could be enjoyed.”

  Three days after its grand opening, a group of female abolitionists rented the hall for their antislavery convention. In a sign of solidarity with the African American population they were trying to help, blacks and whites entered the hall, arm in arm.

  The sight of white women walking arm in arm with black men proved to be too much for the agitated crowd of belligerent onlookers. Within minutes, an uncontrollable mob broke into the hall. They shattered windows, broke chairs and tables, punched and kicked attendees, and eventually burned the entire building to the ground.

  But the burning of Pennsylvania Hall would only serve to unify, to rally and strengthen the antislavery cause in Philadelphia. This was important since the city seemed largely in denial about the possibility of an American Civil War.

  Despite the growing tension across the country, it was said of Philadelphia that “everything southern was exalted and worshiped.” A fact that was likely doubly true for the medical community, where over half the population of both students and doctors were Southern-born . . . including Mütter and Meigs. And as usual, how the two men responded to the threat of a Civil War couldn’t be more different.

  • • •

  Though Meigs was raised largely in the South, his immediate family embraced his wife’s Northern values. His son John would even help found the Union League of Philadelphia, “a patriotic society to support the Union and driven by its founding motto, Amor Patriae Ducit (‘Love of Country Leads’).”

  When the gruff Charles D. Meigs surprised his son by asking for the opportunity to speak in favor of abolition in front of his friends at the Union League, the younger Meigs was thrilled and agreed. It turned out to be a terrible mistake.

  “All who knew him will remember that the book [that Charles D. Meigs] loved most dearly was a treatise on the races of men by the Count de Gobineau,” his grandson Harry I. Meigs remembered. “In these learned volumes my grandfather became wrapped up through and through, and saturated with the ever-flowing stream of their wisdom. . . . My grandfather always put himself among the Aryan or noble race, and he liked to discover in his grandchildren the unmistakable marks of the Aryan outline. . . . The prosperity of our country, and the rapid strides with which it has sprung up to greatness, were by him referred to the weight of Aryan blood in our veins; and his chief source of disgust was the backsliding which he foresaw from the terrible ‘commingling of the nations.’”

  In his inflammatory speech, the
older Meigs argued, before an audience of men and women who were fighting on behalf of the equality of the races, that the great tragedy of slavery was the “half-breed” children who came from white masters raping their black slaves. Not the rape, nor the concept of enslaving another human itself. No, to Meigs, it was the miscegenation—the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types. It was the horror he felt at the idea that his “godlike race, the archetype of the Grecian demigods and heroes” would procreate with the “nude and barbarous tribes of the African race.”

  In the free North, he argued, freed blacks knew their place, and white people would never choose to “comingle” with them. But the nature of slavery—the power dynamic in his mind trapped both slave and master—made this “comingling” inevitable.

  “Let due honor and reverence be forever rendered, therefore, to those sober, wise, provident philanthropists of Pennsylvania, who erected an impassable wall of separation between the colored and the white races in the Keystone State, by the manumission of all slaves and the prohibition of slavery here forever,” Meigs told the audience of his son’s abolitionist friends. “It was in 1780 that this wall was builded. . . . It was not alone an anti-slavery wall, but it was an anti-miscegenation wall, and so strong, so thick, and so high is it, that the crime of miscegenation here is not less odious, or less frequent, than murder itself.”

  The elder Meigs’s speech would prove to be so offensive to the gathered crowd of abolitionists that his son John would eventually have to resign his position with the Union League.

  • • •

  Mütter, like Meigs, had also been raised in the South. Though he had lived in Philadelphia for more than two decades now, he was still close to Colonel Robert Carter, young heir to the Carter family fortune who had agreed to take in the orphaned Mütter as his ward. Mütter himself had grown up in Sabine Hall, the Carters’ expansive estate, which was then, and continued to be, the home to dozens of slaves.

  But Mütter employed only free men in his own house in Philadelphia, and unlike Meigs, he did not believe there was any biological difference between the races past the superficial. He even included illustrations of people of color in his surgical textbook, and was happy to share what he knew to be the simple truth—that despite all the different skin colors that humans can possess, the bones, organs, muscles, and tissue beneath that skin remain consistent, that once you cut a person open, we all look pretty much the same.

  Equally true to Mütter was the feeling that the United States must be kept together if it were to succeed, and that secession of the Southern states—as was often threatened—could never be the answer.

  Jefferson Medical College strived to stay apolitical in this charged time, no doubt inspired by the fact that over half its student population came from the South.

  The board insisted that its faculty members not speak about politics of the day, calling any debate about slavery or secession “that great maelstrom” that “swallows up time and character, morals, reputation, and money, and which makes no return whatever but disappointment and vexation of spirit.”

  But Mütter was unable to stop himself from using his position to speak bluntly and passionately to his students.

  “Oh, how strange a spectacle has this our ‘thrice blessed’ country exhibited for the past few months,” he told them. “The brother’s love supplanted by the fratricide’s hate; the pride of greatness smothered beneath the folds of the serpent of discord; the holy spirit of Union nearly put to flight by the demon of anarchy and civil strife!

  “And all for what?” he asked. “Simply because our people, forgetting their duty to the ‘Constitution and Laws,’ have ceased to be true patriots! Will any one believe that the ‘magnificent fabric of Union’ could for a moment be placed in jeopardy, had we loved it with the true love of a patriot?

  “But how fearful responsibility do those assume who dare breathe the word Disunion,” he said. “Disunion!—it makes our blood run cold to hear it even named, and yet men talk about it, predict it, defend it.

  “Oh, could these [conspirators] but realize the glory that even now hangs over our land, or, looking into futurity, picture themselves the wondrous and gorgeous destiny that naturally awaits the ‘refuge of oppressed,’” he said, clearly announcing his sentiments regarding the still controversial topic of abolition, “possibly their impious hands might be stayed, and the infamy of the traitor transferred to ages yet in the womb of time.

  “Go home, then, gentlemen,” he implored all the students, but looked directly at Southern ones, “determined to do all in your power to avert so fearful a crime as disunion. Go home, determined to cultivate a spirit of conciliation towards all portions of our land. Go home, determined to be patriots. Posterity bids you do this; the voices of the illustrious dead of every quarter of our land bid you do this.

  “Go home,” he told them finally, “and let the noble language of the illustrious [American lawyer Daniel] Webster sink deep into your hearts: I confess that, if I were to witness the breaking up of the Union . . . I should bow myself to the earth in confusion of face—I should wish to hide myself from the observance of mankind, unless I could stand up and declare truly, before God and man, that by the utmost exertion of every faculty with which my creator had endowed me, I had labored to avert catastrophe!”

  But like so many things in Mütter’s life, this too was out of his control. And despite the best efforts and fair warnings, so many of the students he lovingly trained in the compassionate art of healing would spend years of their lives on battlefields and in makeshift hospitals, stitching together broken bodies, sawing off shattered limbs, and burying the woeful dead.

  As for Meigs, his downfall would not be caused by the comments he made in political forums. No, Meigs’s disgrace would come in the form of backlash from one group he never suspected would turn on him: the medical community.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  LOOK TO GOD FOR PARDON

  Meigs

  Infectious disease had always been a problem for Philadelphia—and as its population exploded, the problem only grew worse.

  While the city had enjoyed a decline in the mortality rate among its citizens during the years between 1825 and 1850—a triumph considering that similar cities like Boston, Baltimore, and New York City saw increases—their good fortune had begun to run out.

  An outbreak of Asiatic cholera killed 1,012 Philadelphians in 1849. An eruption of smallpox took 427 lives in 1852. Yellow fever swept into the city the following year and left 128 corpses in its wake. These numbers were in addition to the deaths caused by illnesses that had become so common in Philadelphia that people thought suffering from them was just an unfortunate, but unavoidable, part of city life.

  The frequently recurring disease, typhus, struck the city throughout the 1840s, killing 205 people in 1848 alone. Dysentery terrorized the city every summer, especially the poorest neighborhoods, and would go on to kill more than 1,700 citizens between 1848 and 1851. Meanwhile, malarial fevers spread easily and frequently in the city’s low, flat lands between the rivers, and tuberculosis, often called consumption, was also a constant presence.

  Ten times as many people died of malaria and tuberculosis in Philadelphia than died of the much more feared cholera, but because the malaria and tuberculosis victims passed away gradually and quietly—they died “romantically,” as it was termed—the general public took to dreading cholera more, for it was known for killing its sufferers “with terrifying speed and ugliness.”

  It was not uncommon for several diseases to have devastating outbreaks at once. In 1852—the same year that smallpox killed more than 400 Philadelphians—433 died of scarlet fever, 558 more of dysentery, and more than 1,200 were claimed by tuberculosis.

  Philadelphia civic leaders had finally begun to suspect that there was a connection between sanitation and disease. Starting in 1849, they began tho
roughly cleaning streets, waterways, and other public spaces in an effort to discourage the constant scourge of disease. Some politicians and religious leaders still insisted that poverty was “the wages of sin” and spoke out against using public money to clean poor neighborhoods. But the practice spoke highly of the intuitiveness of the day’s leaders and would prove a blessing to all the citizens of the city that, for once, its government used sanitary measures—instead of prayer—to fight the constant epidemics.

  • • •

  But if there was a stubborn holdout in Philadelphia when it came to not believing in the infectiousness of diseases, it was Charles D. Meigs.

  Meigs had become a star in American medicine precisely because of how deeply—and sometimes blindly—he held on to his beliefs, and the incredible lengths to which he would go to fiercely defend them.

  Meigs’s career had been defined by his passion for what he considered “the right way” to do things and the bold, shamelessly theatrical style—in both lecture and print—with which he espoused these theories. His generation had held that physicians were almost all-knowing gods with whom you should never disagree, and Meigs had qualms about indulging in sentimentalism or speculation to make his point. He thought nothing of belittling his patients, or even his fellow doctors, to ensure his opinions were heard. While it was true that his vision of medicine had begun to be challenged over the course of his career, he had never truly been “one-upped.” And because of this, he had always been respected . . . and perhaps a bit feared.

  But in the 1850s, the cracks began to show, and the medical community began to look more critically upon the chest-puffing, fact-refuting style of doctors like Meigs.