Mütter’s healing work inspired former students, from the celebrated Civil War surgeon Jonathan Letterman to the...
Biography of a flamboyant surgeon who helped transform American medicine.
A leading figure at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College in the early 19th century, Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter (1811-1859) won acclaim for his remarkable reconstructive surgeries on deformed patients (with bad burns, cleft palates, mangled faces, etc.) whom most people dismissed as monsters. His hands were “a confident blur of motion” as he worked to alleviate the suffering of patients, writes poet Aptowicz (The Year of No Mistakes, 2013, etc.), whose earlier screenplay on Mütter won many awards. “Where others once saw a monster, Mütter thought, he had revealed the man.” In her deftly crafted narrative, the author provides an absorbing account of the charismatic surgeon’s life and career as well as a vivid look at the medical practices and prejudices of his time. His students adored him, and the disfigured flocked to him. European contemporaries saw him as a “dashing, outspoken, idiosyncratic American visionary.” In an era when many physicians were callous, medical rivals often balked at the kindly Mütter’s successful introduction of such innovations as recovery rooms, clean surgical areas and the use of ether anesthesia in surgery. After treating a man who suffered from elephantiasis, the surgeon took up a collection for him. Aptowicz draws nicely on Mütter’s speeches and lectures to reveal the depth of his empathetic philosophies and humanist approach. In his teaching, he made extensive use of an unusual collection of some 2,000 anatomical specimens—diseased bones, skeletons, deformed organs preserved in jars—as well as paintings, drawings and instruments. These “marvels” formed the core of Philadelphia’s popular Mütter Museum, which opened in 1858.
Mütter’s healing work inspired former students, from the celebrated Civil War surgeon Jonathan Letterman to the pharmaceutical manufacturer E.R. Squibb. His life story will move many readers.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59240-870-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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