Excerpt from Dr. Mütter's Marvels by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There was no anesthesia—neither general nor local. Alcohol was commonly used when it came to enduring painful treatments, although highly addictive laudanum (a tincture of ninety percent alcohol and ten percent opium) and pure opium were sometimes available too. If you came to a doctor with a compound fracture, you had only a fifty percent chance of survival. Surgery on brains and lungs was attempted only in accident cases. Bleeding during operations was often outrageously profuse, but, as comfortingly described by one doctor, "not unusually fatal."

Physicians working in this time period were largely unaware that innovations were on the horizon that would make "a pauper in the almshouse more comfortable and cared for better after an operation than a king," as one late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia doctor described the state of medicine in the first half of his century.

And it was a strictly enforced male-dominated field. In the early 1800s, there was not a single female physician in Philadelphia. More than that, women's role in medicine in any form was often disparaged. In a speech given at the Philadelphia County Medical Society, female nurses were described as "very generally ignorant, often dirty and sometimes drunk." The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal ran a letter to the editor decrying an ad for a woman practicing medicine, stating, "Science itself is not only disgraced by being made the instrument of a petty income to an ignorant, presuming, flippant-tongued female, but she thus brings contempt upon the sex, of whom better things are expected."

"Individual discoveries are glorious and worthy, but we must give due need of praise to the hard working, obscure practitioners, who regardless of fame and wealth apply them," a late-nineteenth-century doctor noted in a speech about mid-century medicine. "Our fathers did wonders with the resources they could command. The lesson of their lives is largely one of dignity, self-sacrifice, devotion to science and regard for the bonds of professional conduct and duty and carelessness as to wealth or fame. Men come and men go, but science lives and advances."

And it was into this world that Thomas Dent Mütter, an orphaned boy now grown up and fresh from his experiences in Paris, returned.

CHAPTER THREE

TO RENDER EVIL MORE ENDURABLE

The Willing Mansion seemed like a perfect place for Thomas Dent Mütter to open his first office for the practice of surgery. Built by former Philadelphia mayor Charles Willing, the mansion was a lovely brick building, three stories high with eleven large windows facing bustling Third Street just below Walnut. It was a stately and impressive place to start what he was sure would be a distinguished career.

Mütter knew that to become distinguished would require not only earning a favorable reputation with the public as a reliably successful surgeon, but also attaining distinction within a wide circle of his professional colleagues. He was sure he would do both and build an impressive practice by showcasing the fantastic techniques he'd learned in Paris.

"Adopting, with all the enthusiasm of his nature, the new precepts which he had been taught for the relief of these affections, he settled down among us," a colleague would later write of Mütter's first year in Philadelphia, "with such a trusting belief in his own resources, such a just confidence in the brightness of his future, that it seemed almost as if he felt that he would be able to renew the marvelous times of old, when supernatural powers came to mingle themselves with men in order to render their evils more endurable."

But even months after opening his office, Mütter sometimes spent long mornings and afternoons alone. Patients were not forthcoming, even though he tried his best "to be agreeable, to be useful, and to be noticed." In fact, Mütter had developed a reputation of "cut[ting] quite a swathe" as he rode around Philadelphia in a low carriage behind a big gray horse, driven by a servant in livery.

Excerpted from Dr. Mütter's Marvels by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz. Copyright © 2014 by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz. Excerpted by permission of Gotham Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.