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

There was cholera, spread through contaminated drinking water, which painfully dehydrated its victims, the affected bodies retching liter upon liter of a fluid that looked like rice water and smelled like fish.

In 1832, cholera spread across the East Coast, finally hitting Philadelphia in July. It became such an overwhelming problem that Philadelphia publishing house Carey, Lea & Blanchard (at the time, the country's leading publisher of medical books) began publishingThe Cholera Gazette, a weekly publication designed to inform the public of the progress and hopeful treatment of this terrible disease. It became wildly popular as the death toll from the disease caused Philadelphia to log in sixty to seventy deaths a day. It took nearly four months for the city to rid itself of the disease, and as testimony to the "heroic role of the medical profession in battling the infection," the city council would eventually reward the physicians in charge of the hospitals during this time with silver pitchers of recognition.

There was also malaria and croup, diphtheria and dysentery, measles and whooping cough, consumption and scarlet fever. Even something as simple as the flu could kill hundreds in a city over one winter.

The swiftness and brutality of disease and death in the nineteenth century was something with which Mütter was already intimately familiar. It was a lesson he'd been forced to learn at an early age.

Lucinda Mutter was nineteen years old and in love when she became pregnant with Thomas in the summer of 1810. She and her husband, John Mutter, had happily married on Christmas Eve three and a half years earlier, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-five.

The two could not have been more different.

Lucinda had been born into the established Gillies family, which was connected, via marriage and blood, to some of the most prestigious families in the South: the military elite Armisteads (five Armistead brothers would fight in the War of 1812, and the British bombardment of George Armistead's fort would later serve as the inspiration for "The Star-Spangled Banner," the future U.S. national anthem); the prominent political family of the Lees (whose family would include not only governors, business leaders, and two signers of the Declaration of Independence, but also General Robert E. Lee, the future leader of the Confederate Army); and the influential Carters (whose patriarch, Robert Carter, was so powerful that he earned the moniker King Carter and, when he died in his late sixties, left behind fifteen children, three thousand acres of farmland, and more than one thousand slaves).

At age fifteen, Lucinda was a young bride even for an ambitious era in which women were frequently married in their late teens. However, she was bright and proudly educated. Early in their marriage, when she and her husband decided to have their portraits painted, she insisted that she be painted with an open book in her hand. John Mutter, on the other hand, was a scrapper. He was a first-generation Scottish immigrant whose father endeared himself to his new countrymen by fighting alongside them in the Revolutionary War. John, like his father, was a hard worker. He was also smart, ambitious, and extremely handsome, and was known to be a good neighbor and a good citizen. By the time he and Lucinda were ready to start their family, John ran a healthy business as a factor and commission agent. To have success in that field, you needed to be both resourceful and multitalented, for these men not only aided farmers in selling their crops but also helped them purchase farming supplies, gave advice concerning the condition of the market or the advisability of selling or withholding a crop, and sometimes even orchestrated the sale or purchase of slaves for a client. Mutter had built his reputation on his charm and his work ethic.

Lucinda gave birth to their first child on March 9, 1811, in the bedroom of their newly purchased home at 5th and Franklin Streets in Richmond, Virginia. The baby was born healthy and pink, and Lucinda named him Thomas, after her husband's late father.

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.