Some may recognize his name from The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pa., but few know that until this year Dr. Thomas Mütter’s strange and inspiring story was largely a mystery.
Get to know the man behind the museum in Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine, written by acclaimed poet and author Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.
Aptowicz will be making her Portland debut at Powell’s City of Books downtown location for a talk on Nov. 3. The talk will begin at 7:30 p.m and admission is free.
Dr. Mütter’s life as a young orphan, and subsequent career in an era when no license or certification was needed to practice medicine, has been wrapped in obscurity.
Aptowicz spent 15 years researching the archives of The Mütter Museum to bring his story to light. Growing up in working-class Philadelphia, The Mütter Museum had been a beloved part of her childhood.
In the midst of her education at New York University, she was given an opportunity to apply for a scholarship. The guidelines required students to write a short screenplay about a scientist.
“Come to find out, there’d never been a book written about him. Not even a magazine article,” Aptowicz said. “Ever since I’ve been sort of obsessed with him. About five years ago, after I wrote Words in Your Face, I realized there could be a real story here and I began to look into funding to make it a full length project.”
She didn’t win that scholarship in the ’90s, but in July 2010 Aptowicz became the ArtsEdge Writer-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, which granted her the funding to spend a full year writing Dr. Mütter’s biography.
With wildly positive reviews in publications ranging from USA Today to The Wall Street Journal to Penthouse Magazine, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels has been something of a runaway success.
Initially, Aptowicz had some concerns about how the book would be received.
“I was worried it would be a story only appealing to people with an interest in niche science or medicine, but it’s doing incredibly well,” she said. “It was published about six weeks ago, and I actually just got word that it’s going into its third printing.”
While he’s most well-known for the medical oddities museum that he left as his legacy, Dr. Mütter’s biography is rich with history, and features many rare illustrations and ephemera.
His appeal is far-reaching, and the success of Aptowicz’ biography proves that you don’t need a medical degree to appreciate it. Mütter was working pre-anesthesia, before there was even a consensus on the danger of germs. Many patients died on the operating table from infections acquired from dirty surgery utensils.
“The early 19th century was a fascinating time in medicine, and he was a surgeon for the severely deformed. What makes him so special was that he was a humanist. He turned surgery into an art form,” Aptowicz said. “His entire family died before his 7th birthday, of disease. He was ill his entire life. What it meant to be a doctor had yet to be defined. You didn’t need a license or degree, you pretty much put up a sign out front and you were in business. He knew what it was like to be on both sides of the table, which is why he was so sympathetic.”
Aptowicz’s research took her into the depths of early medicine, and one of her favorite stories from her investigation is about a doctor from the generation prior to Dr. Mütter, Benjamin Rush.
Rush was hugely influential at the time, and mostly wrong. He assembled the medical kits for the Lewis and Clark expedition, and he put in a special concoction that was essentially a liquid laxative.
“It was so violent in effect that they referred to it as the thunderclapper. It turned out it was mostly mercury! Modern archaeologists are better able to track the expedition because of the mercury fecal droppings,” Aptowicz said.
It is delightful tidbits like this that fans can look forward to if they attend Aptowicz’s reading.
Aptowicz said that it will be quick-paced, a healthy mixture of illustrations and performative excerpt readings. The event will also feature local poet Brian S. Ellis, as well as former Portland poet, Anis Mogjani.
The reading is shrouded in nearly as much mystery as Dr. Mütter himself.
“She’s invited me to read a selected excerpt from Dr Mütter’s Marvels,” Mogjani said, “which I’m pumped for, but not sure what to expect. Only that knowing Cristin, it should be a fun, informative and kickass evening.”
