Dr. Mutter's Marvels by Cristin O'keefe Aptowicz

Author:Cristin O'keefe Aptowicz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

THESE DEEDS OF BLOOD

Hands Deformed by Gout

To anyone who saw him in the early 1850s, Mütter still seemed the picture of health. Now entering his early forties, he remained “a singularly handsome man”: youthful, slender, and graceful with a clear sweet voice of remarkable strength and carrying power. Years after he was reprimanded at his school for wearing “a style of dress not altogether proper for a boy his age,” Mütter’s style remained scrupulously neat. He was “in fact, almost a dandy,” one of his colleagues later recalled.

When his schedule allowed him to attend parties or gatherings, he continued to be praised, by men and women alike, for being both “a delightful conversationalist and an admirable raconteur.”

Few outside his close circle of friends knew that Mütter was not a well man.

• • •

Mütter was never able to fully shake the ailments that had plagued him since boyhood, but recently, they had grown much worse. What had always been frustrating, painful, and draining was now wholly unmanageable.

Mütter’s lungs never fully recovered from that brutal winter he spent at Yale. He was constantly overtaxing them—both by giving lengthy lectures in bustling, overcrowded lecture halls and by exposing himself daily to the harsh chemicals of the surgical room. His weak lungs couldn’t help but be irritated by the fumes of that confined space: alcohol, ether, even burning lamp oil. He caught colds easily, fought draining fatigue, and sometimes had trouble catching his breath. But recently, his lungs had begun to shudder and ache in his chest, and when an agonizingly long coughing fit finally subsided, he would look down and see his handkerchief stained with splashes of his own bright red blood.

Meanwhile, the gout he seemed to have inherited from his grandmother preyed endlessly upon him, making him “inconceivably sensitive to pain.” Without warning and seemingly without reason, the joints of his hands and feet would grow hot and red, painfully swollen to the point that even air passing over the affected part would cause searing pain, as if he were being poked by a dozen blistering needles. No matter what treatment he sought or to what preventive care he devoted himself, nothing helped.

As he was a surgeon, Mütter’s hands were one of his most valuable tools. Swift and nimble, quick and precise, they were one of the reasons he was able to do the work he did. It was rare blessing enough to be ambidextrous. But to be as skilled as Mütter was with both his hands was seen as near miraculous (“Few can boast of [being ambidextrous] . . . and often, many who can have in fact only two left hands,” a fellow doctor once quipped).

So when gout would temporarily cripple his hands, it would ruin days and sometimes weeks of effort and preparation, since he would be absolutely unable to perform any of the delicate surgeries he promised he would.

But Mütter knew he had to keep working. The famed clinic of Jefferson College was only becoming more popular as the Faculty of ’41 celebrated an unbroken decade together.

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