Dr. Mutter's Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Well, after reading this I gotta see the The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia to see the medical oddities curated there from this amazingly innovative doctor's collection. The book's horrifying tales of thigh-high antebellum leg amputations sans anesthesia with special helpers tasked to hold down each other of the patient-victim's limbs make me glad to be alive in these "modern" times. The onset of sterile conditions for surgical procedures dawns in this man's career with his own concern for cleanliness apparently as much a symptom of OCD-like fastidiousness on his part than true scientific/medical knowledge. And to think accepting the even crude and unreliable anesthesia techniques (ether, laughing gas, laudanum, etc.) was decried by people like Charles D. Meigs, an influential obstetrician who loathed Mütter’s "overly" modern medical opinions and felt a painful childbirth was a Biblical requirement.
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