Dr Mütter'S Marvels

Description:The mesmerizing, first-ever biography of the brilliant and eccentric physician and innovator who revolutionized surgery and founded America's finest museum of medical oddities.

In Dr. Mütter's Marvels, Crostin O'Keefe Aptowicz chronicles the remarkable life of Dr. Thomas Dent Mütters (1811-59), a dazzling, young American surgeon who was so flamboyant and audacious that he wore colorful silk suits to perform surgery, embellished his last name with an umlaut, and was described as the '[P.T.} Barnum of the surgery room.'

Rising to the challenges of operating on the severely deformed while they remained awake (as was the standard practice)—and when others viewed them only as 'monsters'— Mütter was a revolutionary figure whose compassion-based philosophies and innovative surgical ideas and breakthroughs clashed with the constraints of the era. The vast collection of medical oddities he amassed to serve as teaching tools for his enormously popular lectures as a professor of medicine would later become the foundation for one of the most (in)famous museums in the world: Philadelphia's Mütter Museum.

From Mütter's childhood as an orphan in the antebellum South and his years spent studying radically avant-garde surgery in Paris to his struggles to establish himself in the medical mecca of Philadelphia and the tumultuous rivalries among his fellow doctors, many of whom publically mocked Mütter's philosophies and procedures, Dr. Mütter's Marvels delves deep into the life and career of a man who was truly ahead of his time.