{"product_id":"dr-mutters-marvels-isbn-9781592409259","title":"Dr. Mutter's Marvels","description":"\u003cb\u003eA mesmerizing biography of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country’s most famous museum of medical oddities\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia, performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools—or even wash his hands. This was the world of medicine when Thomas Dent Mütter began his trailblazing career as a plastic surgeon in Philadelphia during the mid-nineteenth century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Although he died at just forty-eight, Mütter was an audacious medical innovator who pioneered the use of ether as anesthesia, the sterilization of surgical tools, and a compassion-based vision for helping the severely deformed, which clashed spectacularly with the sentiments of his time. Brilliant, outspoken, and brazenly handsome, Mütter was flamboyant in every aspect of his life. He wore pink silk suits to perform surgery, added an umlaut to his last name just because he could, and amassed an immense collection of medical oddities that would later form the basis of Philadelphia’s renowned Mütter Museum.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Award-winning writer Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz vividly chronicles how Mütter’s efforts helped establish Philadelphia as a global mecca for medical innovation—despite intense resistance from his numerous rivals. (Foremost among them: Charles D. Meigs, an influential obstetrician who loathed Mütter’s “overly modern” medical opinions.) In the narrative spirit of \u003ci\u003eThe Devil in the White City\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDr. Mütter’s Marvels\u003c\/i\u003e interweaves an eye-opening portrait of nineteenth-century medicine with the riveting biography of a man once described as the “[P. T.] Barnum of the surgery room.” | “[Aptowicz’s] poetic eye is exactly what makes \u003ci\u003eDr. Mütter’s Marvels\u003c\/i\u003e a marvel itself. . . . With clinical precision, Aptowicz lays bare the facts of Mütter’s colorful, tumultuous life. . . . For a book so immersed in the intimate perspective of its subject, it also brings a broad perspective about everything from the development of modern medicine to women’s issues of the nineteenth century, not to mention how norms of beauty and the definitions of monstrosity have inspired and held us back over the centuries. With \u003ci\u003eDr. Mütter’s Marvels\u003c\/i\u003e, Aptowicz keeps a steady hand on her historical scalpel, even as she wields it with a winning flourish.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—NPR Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ms. Aptowicz rescues Mütter the man from undeserved obscurity, recreating his short life and hard times with wit, energy, and gusto. Her book, like the Mütter Museum, is a reminder that the course of human suffering and the progress of medical science are often messy, complex, and stranger than can be imagined.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“As a huge fan of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, I was excited to get my hands on this rich biography of the real doctor, Thomas Mütter, a nineteenth-century surgeon who treated people with misunderstood conditions and amassed a fascinating collection of medical oddities.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—USA Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Austin-based poet and writer Aptowicz, a woman whose various awards and publications attest to her formidable skill and style when dealing with an impressive diversity of subjects . . . provide[s] such a thorough and compelling account of Mütter’s life and times, his medical innovations and personal fortitude, his enduring legacy, as is to be found between the well-designed covers of this new book.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Austin Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Aptowicz does an excellent job of establishing the context of the times and competing personalities. . . .  As Aptowicz clearly shows, [Mütter’s] legacy lives on in many aspects of medicine we now take for granted.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Aptowicz has a keen eye for the era’s grotesque details (amputation accidents, for one thing) and an obvious sympathy for Mütter’s passion and legacy.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Aptowicz shows Mütter, beloved by his students, evolving from a mischievous, impatient young doctor to an increasingly spiritual man beset by premature illness, and her writing is as full of life as her subject.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly \u003c\/i\u003e(Starred Review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eDr. Mütter’s Marvels\u003c\/i\u003e is both an insightful portrait of a pioneering surgeon and a reminder of how far medicine has come.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—BookPage\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eDr. Mütter’s Marvels\u003c\/i\u003e is narrative nonfiction at its best. . . . Aptowicz is refreshingly careful with her language, keeping the narrative speculation to a minimum, painting most of her scenery with the weight of her research. She revels in the details, but largely lets the reader draw their own conclusions. The result is an approachable history of a man and of a time period that does exactly what narrative nonfiction should do: answers the questions the reader never realized they had.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—A.V. Club\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In her deftly crafted narrative, the author provides an absorbing account of the charismatic surgeon’s life and career as well as a vivid look at the medical practices and prejudices of his time. Aptowicz draws nicely on Mütter’s speeches and lectures to reveal the depth of his empathetic philosophies and humanist approach.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Kirkus Reviews \u003c\/i\u003e(Starred Review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Aptowicz penned a fast-moving and popular history of the early- to mid-nineteenth-century American and Parisian medical worlds, making the most of works by and about Mütter’s contemporaries.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Library Journal \u003c\/i\u003e(Starred Review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Aptowicz pens a fascinating and muscular biography of Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter, splendidly re-creating the doctor’s medical advancements, the age in which he worked, and the conditions and practices he sought to change.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e, Wyatt’s World\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Aptowicz approaches her subject with passion and finesse, so that the book reads more like fiction than nonfiction, ensuring that it will appeal to a wide audience.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, Galley Talk\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s ‘true tale of intrigue and innovation at the dawn of modern medicine’ is such a captivating, gripping, and intensely interesting historical tale that even the reader who has mere casual interest in the subject will find themselves devouring Aptowicz’s text in a matter of days, if not hours.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Fanboy Comics\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ms. Aptowicz rescues Mütter the man from undeserved obscurity, recreating his short life and hard times with wit, energy, and gusto. Her book, like the Mütter Museum, is a reminder that the course of human suffering and the progress of medical science are often messy, complex, and stranger than can be imagined.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eDr. John J. Ross\u003c\/b\u003e, author of\u003ci\u003e Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough: Diagnosing the Medical Groans and Last Gasps of Ten Great Writers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An extraordinary, moving, and humbling story about a remarkable and compassionate surgeon who changed the face of medicine forever. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz immerses us in the strange world of Dr. Thomas Mütter and unfolds the tale of his pioneering approach to surgery with verve, wit, and sensitivity. We are all of us the richer for Dr. Mütter’s visionary work and the legacy he left us in the shape of one of the world’s most beguiling museums.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eWendy Moore\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  | \u003cb\u003eCristin O’Keefe Aptowicz\u003c\/b\u003e is an award-winning writer of \u003ci\u003eWords in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam \u003c\/i\u003eand popular touring poet and spoken-word performer. She lives in Austin, Texas. | \u003cb\u003eCHAPTER ONE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eMONSTERS\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEven 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNow 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• • •\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePerhaps 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMutter 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eParis 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• • •\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGetting 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMutter 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMutter 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMutter 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• • •\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen the sea was calm and the sky bright and blue, he forced himself to stand on the ship’s deck and look toward what he hoped was Europe. He tried to enjoy these moments, but he didn’t know true relief until the crew pointed out birds appearing in the sky, a sign that they were approaching land, after more than a month at sea.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• • •\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen Mutter finally arrived in Paris, it immediately reminded him of the ocean; it too was vast and wild and incredibly loud. Unlike at sea, however, in Paris he felt perfectly at home.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIts streets were packed, people and buildings in every direction. His world was suddenly and delightfully filled with new sounds, new scents, new music. There were colorfully dressed women sweeping the streets, and strapping men carrying enormous bundles on their heads. There were strange-looking carriages that seemed like relics of a barbarous age, which were in turn being pulled by enormous and brash horses. Even the food being eaten at street-side cafes seemed strange and exotic to Mutter. The city avenue was a vast museum of wonderful new sights to gawk at, and it seemed that the French wanted it that way. They loved to look, and to be looked at. It was true what Mutter had heard: Those French who could spare the time would flamboyantly promenade every day. And on Sundays, absolutely everyone did.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOnce Mutter had secured modest student housing, he set out to promenade himself. He’d been sure to pack his finest clothes for the journey: suits cut close to his slim frame (his natural thinness being perhaps one of the only benefits he’d gained from the illnesses that had plagued him since childhood) and made from the most expensive fabrics he could afford in the brightest colors in stock. Years earlier, a schoolmaster once wrote to Colonel Carter, Mutter’s guardian, that his pupil’s “principal error is rather too much fondness for a style of dress not altogether proper for a boy his age.” Clearly, that schoolmaster had never been to Paris.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMutter enjoyed the moment, peacocking on Parisian streets for the first time, a master of his fate. The lines between Mutter’s starting points and his destination were not often straight, but he took pride and comfort in knowing that he always got there. And the next morning, he would begin the next phase of his mission, his true goal in Paris: to learn everything he could about modern medicine until his money, or his luck, ran out.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• • •\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1831, over a half million people called Paris their home, and by royal decree, each French citizen was entitled to free medical treatment from any of the dozens of hospitals within the city limits. The hospitals were typically open to any visiting doctors, provided one could show them a medical degree and, when necessary, place the right amount of coins into the right hands.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStudying medicine in Paris became so popular that guidebooks were written just for the visiting American doctors. Nowhere else in the world, one wrote, could “experience be acquired by the attentive student as in the French capital . . . where exists such a vast and inexhaustible field for observation . . .”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWoman with Ulcer of the Face\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd it was true. Where else but Paris would there be not one but two hospitals devoted entirely to the treatment of syphilis? Afflicted women were sent to the Hôpital Lourcine, a hospital filled with the most frightful instances of venereal ravages. The men were sent to the Hôpital du Midi, which required that all patients be publicly whipped as punishment for contracting the disease, both before and after treatment.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHôpital des Enfants-Malades was a hospital for ill children, and was nearly always filled to capacity. It had a grim mortality rate—one in every four children who came for treatment died there—but the doctors on staff assured visiting scholars that this was because most of the patients came from the lowest classes of society and thus were frequently brought to the hospital already in a hopeless or dying condition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDoctors specializing in obstetrics could visit Hôpital de la Maternité. It served laboring women only, and averaged eleven births a day. Some days, however, the numbers rose to twenty-five or thirty women, each wailing in her own bed, as the doctors and midwives (calledsages-femmes) rushed among them. New mothers were allowed to stay nine days after giving birth, and the hospital even supplied them with clothing and a small allowance, provided they were willing to take the child with them. Not all of the women were.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés for abandoned children was founded. Newborns arrived daily from Hôpital de la Maternité from women unable or unwilling to keep their children, as well as those infants whose mothers died while giving birth, as one in every fifty women who entered Hôpital de la Maternité did.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés also allowed Parisian citizens to come directly to the hospital and hand over a child of any age. The hospital encouraged families to register and mark the children they were leaving so they might reclaim them at a later date, but the families who chose to do so were few. In fact, the vast majority of the children there had arrived via le tour.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLe tour d’abandon (“the desertion tower”) was merely a box attached to the hospital, constructed with two sliding doors and a small, loud bell. An infant was unceremoniously placed in the box, the door firmly closed behind it, and the bell was rung. Upon hearing the bell, the nurses on duty would go to le tour to remove the infant, replace the box to its original position, and wait. Every night, a dozen or so infants were received in precisely this way.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor a while, it had been in vogue for wealthy, childless individuals to adopt children from the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés to bring up as their own, but the practice had long since fallen out of fashion. At the time of Mutter’s visit, more than sixteen thousand children were considered wards of the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés, and of those, only twelve thousand would live to adulthood.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere were hospitals for lunatic women and for idiot men, hospitals for the incurable, for the blind, for the deaf and dumb, and even for ailing elderly married couples who wished to die together—they could stay in the same large room provided that the furniture they used to furnish their room became the property of the hospice upon their deaths.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd perhaps most astonishing to the visiting American doctors, Paris had the École Pratique d’Anatomie, which provided any doctor, for six dollars, access to his own cadaver for dissection. In America, cadaver dissection was largely illegal. Many doctors resorted to grave robbing to have the opportunity to examine the human body fully. In Paris, twenty doctors at a time would whittle a human body down to its bones—provided they could stand the smell and the ultimate method of disposal of the dissected corpses: At day’s end, the decimated remains were fed to a pack of snarling dogs kept tied up in the back.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHowever, more than any single hospital, what most attracted Mutter to Paris were the surgeons: brilliant and daring men who were to him living gods, redefining medicine and at the zenith of their renown.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• • •\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMutter had always loved surgical lectures and made sure he secured seats as close to the front as possible. In Philadelphia, there were two great medical colleges—the University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson Medical College—and it was customary for the rival schools to hold surgical demonstrations so that prospective students could choose between them, a glorified public relations exercise. Mutter loved the daringness of the surgeries attempted during this time. The lectures were often packed, as eager established and prospective doctors thrilled at the city’s best surgeons attempting to outdo one another with their skill and showmanship. However, the combination of ambitious surgeries and unprepared young men sometimes proved disastrous. On one occasion, a Jefferson Medical College professor attempted a daring removal of a patient’s upper jaw, using marvelous speed to incise the face and rip out the bones with a huge forceps. But the surgery was perhaps too much for a public display. Doctors who were present would later recall the spectacle of it, how the partially conscious patient spat out blood, bones, and teeth, while unnerved students in the audience vomited and fainted in their seats.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut regardless of how brutal or simple the case, all surgical lectures were a challenge to watch. The anxious patient would be publicly examined and forced to listen to his surgery loudly outlined to an audience of strangers. Next, the patient would nervously drink some wine with the hope that it would dull the nerves and lessen the pain. (In Paris, the need for medicinal wine was so great, the hospital system maintained its very own wine vaults, spending more than 600,000 francs a year on an extensive collection of red and white wine housed exclusively for its patients.)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe patient was then instructed to lie on the surgical table, where he would be held down by the surgeon’s assistants and told to stay as still as possible. Everyone—the patient, the doctor, even the students in their seats—knew how impossible this command would be to follow.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe first incision usually brought the patient’s first scream—the first scream of many. Soon came the blood, the struggle, the shock. The patient would beg the surgeon to stop, plead and shout, and yell to the students to come save him, his voice cracking, tears streaming down his face. The surgeon was expected to ignore it all, to move forward swiftly and surely, and to hope that his assistants were strong men with equal resolve. Every student had heard stories of patients who were able to struggle free, who leapt off the table and attacked their doctors—often with the surgeon’s own instruments!—before running out of the room, leaving a trail of their own blood behind them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMan with Tumor of the Jaw\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo Mutter, ignoring the patient was one of the most difficult parts of surgery. He struggled to develop the ability to temporarily see past the patient’s pain—their wide and desperate eyes—and focus solely on his goals as the surgeon.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt had always been explained to him that the most important quality of a good surgeon is confidence, born of both education and experience. You needed to know you were right and that your actions were right, regardless of what was happening around you. Mutter understood this, but in the moment, it was often still a difficult instruction to follow.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOf course, in spite of the skill and care of the surgeon, the patients often died. Sometimes they died in the middle of surgery, the trauma to their bodies becoming too much. Sometimes they would die after, because their wounds were unable to stop bleeding, or the unwashed tools of their own surgeon had given them a fevered infection that consumed their flesh from the inside out. Under the best circumstances, the patient not only lived but lived a better life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd it was this opportunity to improve a life that caused Mutter to be deeply attracted to studying surgery. Having spent so much time as a patient when he was a child—being bled by lancet or by leech, fed tinctures and bitter weeds, left to sweat it out alone in his bed or soaked in a special bath—he was perhaps too familiar with other, nonsurgical branches of medicine, where recovery was often a guessing game. Sometimes, the relief would be almost immediate once treatment had begun, but more often, the results were undefined, his chest rattling for weeks, his body left to grow gray and thin.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSurgery, however, was not a guessing game; it was an art. People came in need of relief, and the surgeons used every ounce of their skill and knowledge to provide it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• • •\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere was one more reason Mutter revered surgery above all other medical pursuits. Surgeons, unlike other professionals of the medical field, were successes of their own creation. While other doctors found their patients—and their positions in society—based on the family they were lucky enough to be born into, surgeons earned their place through hard work, study, and skill. In fact, it seemed to Mutter that the best surgeons came from the lower or middle classes. It was a “natural consequence of this state of things,” one doctor from the era wrote, seeing that “very few persons entitled by birth or other advantageous circumstances . . . would condescend to study, much less engage in the practice of medicine,” thus “poor and ambitious young men from the provinces were induced to repair to Paris and enter upon the study of the only profession through which they could expect to obtain distinction and worldly prosperity.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt was well known that several of the best-respected surgeons and physicians in France had risen from the lowest castes of life and many from the uttermost depths of poverty. Even the acclaimed chief surgeon of Hôtel Dieu, Guillaume Dupuytren, who was often referred to as the Emperor of Surgery, had been born poor and had struggled. Furthermore, he was not ashamed of it, but rather credited his background with his success, telling his students that “had not Monsieur Dupuytren been compelled from poverty to trim his student’s lamp with oil from the dissecting-room, he never would have succeeded in becoming Monsieur le Baron Dupuytren.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• • •\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMutter knew that surgery was his calling, and raced through the streets of Paris to study the work of its greatest practitioners. He was aggressive in his pursuits, pushing through crowds to secure the best seats at the surgical lectures, or firmly staying as close as possible to the lecturing doctors as they made their rounds in hospital, no matter how much the other students pushed. Meals of spiced mutton and fresh bread went half-finished as he plotted the next week’s schedule. Bowls of café au lait were abandoned so he could make an early start every morning, eager to begin his day.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe had come to Paris assuming it would be the doctors themselves who would have the greatest influence on him, these men who were legends in their own time. Chief among them was Guillaume Dupuytren, who ruled over the Hôtel-Dieu, the city’s largest hospital, and single-handedly changed how surgery was done. An immensely brilliant operator, exhibiting marvelous dexterity, proceeding with almost inconceivable speed, his boorish arrogance became as famous as his accomplishments in the surgical room. Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin was head of the Hôpital de la Pitié, the city’s second-largest hospital. He was Dupuytren’s greatest friend turned into his most bitter rival, and spent most of his life trying to escape Dupuytren’s shadow. Lisfranc was known to refer to Dupuytren as “the bandit of the river bank,” while Dupuytren frequently called Lisfranc “that man with the face of an ape and the heart of a crouching dog.” There was Philibert Joseph Roux—who so dazzled his classes with his graceful and brilliant work that it was said “his operations were the poetry of surgery,” but who had also earned Dupuytren’s scorn years earlier by winning the hand of the woman they both loved. And Alfred-Armand-Louis-Marie Velpeau, whose textbook on obstetrics was so influential, it had been translated into English by one of America’s most respected obstetricians: Philadelphia’s own Charles D. Meigs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMutter was deeply impressed with the audacity of each of these surgeons’ talents and their seemingly inexhaustible work ethic. However, it was not any single man who ended up changing the course of Mutter’s life but, rather, a new field of surgery freshly emerging in Paris, which even the French referred to as la chirurgie radicale.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWho sought out this radical surgery?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWoman with Severe Burns of the Face\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMonsters. This is how the patients would have been categorized in America. Mutter was used to seeing them replicated in wax for classroom display, or hidden in\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Avery","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48338542887141,"sku":"NP9781592409259","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781592409259.jpg?v=1769572612","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/dr-mutters-marvels-isbn-9781592409259","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}