Dr. Mutter's Marvels

Dr. Mutter’s Marvels 

by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

Reviewed by Gerti

The origins of things are sometimes fascinating. That is the case with “Dr. Mutter’s Marvels” by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, who looks at the background of The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia by discussing the life and career of famed surgeon Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter. Mutter’s collection of human specimens from his years as chair of surgery at the Jefferson Medical College in Philly are housed in the building Mutter’s money paid for. I’d heard of the place before, with its renowned collection of physical oddities not unlike Ripley’s Museum, but I had never heard anything about Dr. Mutter himself. Aptowicz here reveals him to be not only a brilliant and talented man who early understood the need for cleanliness in the operating theatres, but who as a doctor also tried to bring compassion to the practice of medicine, and especially to surgery in those early days before anesthetics were commonly used. In fact, Mutter was one of the first surgeons in Philadelphia to use ether after it was discovered, and it is amazing today that there were other pre-eminent physicians at the time who fought against using it because they only knew by the intensity of the patient’s screams how the surgery was going! What it terrifying time it must have been to be sick!

Mutter was a child destined to be a doctor, since disease made him first an only child, and then an orphan. As the author writes so eloquently, “Thomas Dent Mutter was just seven years old, and every person who had ever loved him was dead.” After his maternal grandmother also dies, Mutter goes to live with a rich relative, a single man in his 20’s named Colonel Carter, who provides Thomas with a home and an education, but was never able to cure Mutter of the physical weakness which would claim his life when he was only in his ‘40s.

Like the proverbial candle that burns half as long, Mutter burned twice as bright during that short life. Even as a school boy, he gained a reputation for wearing outrageously bright suits in a day and age where black and brown were commonplace. He originally attended a small Virginia college before heading to Yale, but was popular everywhere he went for his good looks and great voice. These things made him a popular instructor when he went to Philadelphia’s new Jefferson Medical College, set up to compete with the city’s already established but stodgy Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania. Mutter had learned his plastic surgery technique in Paris, the best place in the world to learn medicine back then, and his goal was always to unmake monsters, that is, to do plastic surgery on people disfigured by burns or tumors, in order to allow them to lead a more normal life. The illustrations in this book show Mutter’s success.

DMM is a fascinating book about a time when medicine was more art than science, and its practitioners were often stumbling around in the dark. Mutter was their light. This well-written book by Aptowicz is a well-researched, but alternately thrilling and terrifying study of a great doctor to whom modern medicine (and every patient!) owes a deep debt of gratitude.