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Well, I've found a new favorite history person.
9 years ago
The story of how it came about is actually kind of amusing. There's a museum I've known about for a while and really want to see called the Mutter Museum. It contains a myriad of... well I guess I'll call it medical curiosities. Deformed skulls and skeletons, models of diseases and pathologies and anatomy, old medical tools and all sorts of cool and weird and macabre things. Knowing I wouldn't be getting to Philadelphia any time soon, I'd been looking for books on the museum to get some info and pictures. I found one called "Dr. Mutter's Marvels" that sounded good and got good reviews. Turns out, it was about Dr. Thomas Mutter himself.
I liked him from the start, and my admiration for him only grew as I kept reading. He was a surgeon during the 1840s and 50s and a teacher at the Jefferson Medical college, with a charming and flamboyant personality. He was very good at what he did and quite ahead of his time.
During a time when it was still unknown how diseases were transmitted, he practiced a (then unusual) amount of cleanliness, both personal and during surgery, which, needless to say, was very beneficial to the patients. Other doctors at the time simply went from one patient to the next, with no cleaning in between, blithely (if unknowingly) spreading disease. One doctor even said that there was just no way the doctors were the cause. Why? Because they were the doctors. Such was the stagnant thinking of the time. But not Mutter.
He took care of his patients, seeing them as people and not just cases. Beforehand he would talk with them, telling them every step of the procedure and what they could expect, and afterwords would tell them how to tend their wounds and even check up on them later to be sure they were doing well, and help them if they weren't. By contrast, it was the norm for other doctors to bring in their patients with nary a word, do their work, and immediately send them back home--which Mutter found quite cruel. After suffering through surgery (with no anesthesia, remember), and then to be carted away in a bumpy, rocking carriage.
He delighted in working on people whom others thought had no hope, namely those who the medical world at the time merely deemed "monsters" due to deformities or abnormalities. Most notably was that of burn patients, mostly women whose dresses had caught on fire and whose faces were disfigured from the burns and melting skin. Many of them could no longer turn their heads or close their mouths or even blink properly. He even devised a new medical procedure to help them.
But neither was he reckless. There were some instances, such as with breast cancer (which was often in an advanced state when the woman would seek out help due to the modesty of the time) where he would not operate, knowing that doing so would only cause undue pain and agony with no improved quality of life.
When ether anesthesia came about, he championed its use despite other doctors--and even patients--wariness of it, knowing how useful it would be in "reducing human pain and suffering," as was the physician's motto at the time.
I had more, but I've forgotten now, and I've blathered on enough. XD
SO yeah. Thomas Mutter. *thumbs up* ^_^
I liked him from the start, and my admiration for him only grew as I kept reading. He was a surgeon during the 1840s and 50s and a teacher at the Jefferson Medical college, with a charming and flamboyant personality. He was very good at what he did and quite ahead of his time.
During a time when it was still unknown how diseases were transmitted, he practiced a (then unusual) amount of cleanliness, both personal and during surgery, which, needless to say, was very beneficial to the patients. Other doctors at the time simply went from one patient to the next, with no cleaning in between, blithely (if unknowingly) spreading disease. One doctor even said that there was just no way the doctors were the cause. Why? Because they were the doctors. Such was the stagnant thinking of the time. But not Mutter.
He took care of his patients, seeing them as people and not just cases. Beforehand he would talk with them, telling them every step of the procedure and what they could expect, and afterwords would tell them how to tend their wounds and even check up on them later to be sure they were doing well, and help them if they weren't. By contrast, it was the norm for other doctors to bring in their patients with nary a word, do their work, and immediately send them back home--which Mutter found quite cruel. After suffering through surgery (with no anesthesia, remember), and then to be carted away in a bumpy, rocking carriage.
He delighted in working on people whom others thought had no hope, namely those who the medical world at the time merely deemed "monsters" due to deformities or abnormalities. Most notably was that of burn patients, mostly women whose dresses had caught on fire and whose faces were disfigured from the burns and melting skin. Many of them could no longer turn their heads or close their mouths or even blink properly. He even devised a new medical procedure to help them.
But neither was he reckless. There were some instances, such as with breast cancer (which was often in an advanced state when the woman would seek out help due to the modesty of the time) where he would not operate, knowing that doing so would only cause undue pain and agony with no improved quality of life.
When ether anesthesia came about, he championed its use despite other doctors--and even patients--wariness of it, knowing how useful it would be in "reducing human pain and suffering," as was the physician's motto at the time.
I had more, but I've forgotten now, and I've blathered on enough. XD
SO yeah. Thomas Mutter. *thumbs up* ^_^
TheMalodorousMephit
~themalodorousmephit
That's pretty neat. i had no idea. I knew about the museum, but not the guy who founded it. Really kind of interesting. i'll have to go read on him some more now.
