Dr. Mütter's Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine

America in the early 1800s was an easy place to die, especially for those unlucky souls so severely deformed that medicine at the time literally classified them as monsters. Enter Thomas Dent Mütter, a brilliant and audacious young mid-nineteenth-century plastic surgeon who revolutionized American medicine with his daring surgical work, pioneering the use of anesthesia, championing the sterilization of surgical tools, and advocating for a compassion-based vision for helping even the most seemingly hopeless of patients, despite intense resistance from his numerous rivals. With Dr. Mütter's Marvels, author Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz gives us both a front-row seat to the good, the bad, and the grotesque of the evolution of American medicine and a riveting biography of a man so flamboyant, in life and in the operating theatre, that he would be crowned the ' P.T. Barnum of the surgery room.'