Thomas Dent Mütter is dead and the world will forget him.
That is what Richard J. Levis thought, feared really, the day he heard the news. Mütter’s death should not have come as a surprise. In his last years, he was a man who struggled to keep the demons of his ill health at bay. And though he worked hard to make sure his ambitious surgeries, his quick wit, and his charmingly ostentatious style of dress were always center stage, even Mütter couldn’t hide how broken his body had become by the endless torture of pain and disease, the same foes he battled his entire career. Perhaps that was why it was still a shock when he finally succumbed to them. Mütter always seemed to be someone who could beguile death to stay away just a little while longer.
Levis had been Mütter’s student at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College. It seemed bitterly ironic that 1859, the year Levis would be named lead surgeon at Philadelphia General Hospital, would also be the year the greatest surgeon he’d ever studied under would die at the age of forty-eight.
Levis remembered walking into the Jefferson Medical College surgical clinic—which Mütter himself had fought to have built—and how Mütter stood at the lectern, giving an ardent joyful greeting to every student as they entered the room. His surgical lectures were universally acknowledged to be unrivaled. Unlike other professors in his time, he always addressed his students in a plainspoken manner, endeavoring to be clearly understood even as his lectures and surgeries became more complex and ornate.
And my God, his surgeries! thought Levis. His ingenuity, his early excellence, the attention he paid to the poor and humble. Would future generations remember how Mütter’s office was thronged with patients from every part of the Union, rich and poor, old and young, attracted by his fame and the promise of his genius, waiting patiently for hours just to consult with him? How the patients in the crowded receiving room at the college’s clinic would gather around him with a confidence and infatuation when he entered, as if to say, “If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.”
And how Mütter made these people whole again.
The broken. The diseased. The cursed. People who were considered monsters, even by medical definition. Mütter welcomed them all. An expert and efficient surgeon, he systematically rehearsed every procedure in his mind before beginning it; each assistant was accurately assigned special duties; and each instrument and requisite appliance was cleaned and laid out before the operating table.
In every view of him, he was a great doctor, even at a time when the definition of what that meant was ever changing, when the path was filled with the poisonous bramble of his critics, obstinate men in power who thought they knew best.
Despite the constant physical struggles that made Mütter’s too-short life blaze so brightly, those who loved him did not see him as a man tormented by the failings of his own body. Mütter was a man who embraced life: He hosted lavish parties; spent late nights with students—current and former—drinking cold beer and eating fresh oysters, laughing loudly; took numerous trips across the Atlantic, where he was greeted warmly by the most eminent medical men of London and Paris; and spared no labor or expense in securing the most valuable material to illustrate his lectures, and thus acquired one of the best private surgical cabinets of his time. A collection of human curiosities so strange and shocking that finding it a permanent home would prove to be one of Mütter’s last great trials.
It seemed impossible to Richard Levis that a man like this could ever be forgotten. Yet he knew it happened every day.
Levis brought a fresh inkpot and pen to his desk. He was not a poet, just a surgeon doggedly working in the second-largest city of a country on the brink of war, but he still considered it his duty to craft a worthy remembrance.
“The subject of this memoir needs no eulogium from us, before the medical profession,” read the piece later published in The Medical and Surgical Reporter, “and our humble hands would attempt to wreathe no new laurels for his brow. . . . The short life of Doctor Mütter, illustrated the most remarkable mental abilities, and the gentlest qualities of heart. For years, we have viewed him at what seemed the zenith of professional eminence, and yet he continued struggling under the oppression of the severest bodily infirmities, to elevate the science to which he was devoted and to relieve the miseries of others.
“His life, until his retirement, was one of incessant labor. His lectures and immense practice occupied the day, and midnight found him still toiling. The allurements of pleasure and the couch of indolence could not attract him from his great pursuit, and he continued to be active until unable to hold up longer against his fate, he sought retirement and repose, a calm well suited to the close of a useful life. . . .
“What an epitome of this life it is to know that so much mental activity has ceased here, forever; that the eye which so lately gleamed with enthusiasm is closed; the cheek which glowed with ardor is pale; the voice which rang so loud and clear with eloquence, is hushed in the endless silence of the tomb.”
Then Levis added one final small plea, that his voice not be the only one to recall this bright and brilliant star. Looking into the future, the brokenhearted former student humbly asked that “other and abler pens write for him, to coming ages” so that his idol could achieve the immortality Levis thought he deserved, and to make Mütter “a deathless name . . . forever blended with the history of American Surgery.”