>> almost that entire time that wee known each other. it started out as a screenplay project at nyu and discovered this story and wrote this amazing screenplay about it, and it actually got made into a short film as one of the awards for the contest she won which you can view on my youtube page because i think it's amazing and what an amazing movie this book is going to be. she didn't give up on the story and knew that she had found an amazing story, and it's one of the, like, longest periods of time i've ever known any of my friends to work on a project x the culmination so amazing, and i'm so proud of her.

it's got a publishers weekly starred review, and i'm so proud of her, cristin o'keefe aptowicz, everyone. [cheers and applause] >> thanks, everybody. i think i just have a mic. so, welcome to the dr. mutter's marvels event at book people. i moved here to finish writing this book because i got an nea grant, and i lived in new york city, and $25,000 does not pay anything in new york city, but it does in austin, yea! [applause] thank you for your cheap breakfast tacos. [laughter] your affordable public transportation. so, today, i'm going to do something a little unusual, i'm going to give you a talk about what i love about thomas denton mutter, and i'm going to have local poets here read excerpts from the book so you get a taste of what it's like. i'm an obsessive nerd, and i'm very excited about the subject

matter, so i can take a long time. p.s., there's some gory images, so i apologize in advance if you ate anything red for dinner. so the book about this man, the founder of the mutter's museum in philadelphia. it's sort of a cult destination. it's a museum for medical oddities. they wouldn't say that, they would say unusual pathological specimens. but i grew up in philadelphia, and i went to that museum in the fourth grade, sixth grade, eighth grade and all throughout high school never knowing the story of why it was founded, and that is what got me interested in the story that i wrote in dr. mutter's marvels. he was born in 1811 to john and lucinda mutter. they were very well-off virginians, very successful merchant. his wife was very well read, and they had two sons; tom first and then later, james. within seven years the entire family, except for tom, died. which was not unusual back in

the 19th century. you would have infectious diseases that would ravage whole families, towns and cities. he was sent to live with his grandmother, and then the grandmother, too, passed away. and they tried to find a home for him, but he was sort of a jinx of a child, no one wanted to take the kid. but he eventually found a home here in saw bean hall -- sabine hall which is the family of the -- the home of the king family. and robert carter was his guard guardian. he sported his -- supported his education but did not support his clothing. even from a very young age, even as an orphan ward he wanted to look really great, and it's sort of emblematic of the person he would later become. he realized a scam he could perform which is he could charge his clothing bill to his school and then earn scholarships to pay it off. so he began just charging all of this money. he got velvet vests and cigars

and leghorn hats and just kept earning academic scholarships to pay it off. it did not work for very long, they stopped giving him money, and he got in a lot of trouble. and he also struggled with illness his entire life. germ theory would not be proven until the end of the 19th century when the modern microscope was used, so infectious diseases could hit you again and again and again, and he was in college when he decided he wanted to go to yale. he had never experienced a northern winter and was incredibly felled by disease, constantly coughing up blood. he met with doctors who were unlike any doctors he had ever known before. back then in the 19th century, you did not need a medical degree to practice medicine, you could or could not apprentice under another doctor. essentially, you put a placard out and that was it. common purgings were bleedings, drinking mercury was also very popular, and sometimes the

treatments made you even sicker than if you had never done anything at all. but he met these doctors who were empathetic to him and treated him like an individual, not as a disease to be cured, but as a person whose suffering needed to be alleviated. and he knew in that moment that he wanted to be a doctor. and if you were to study medicine anywhere in america in the early half of the 19th century, you would study it here in philadelphia, the place where i was born. it does not look like this anymore, but it did during mutter's time. philadelphia was the home of the first ever medical school, university of pennsylvania founded by benjamin franklin, and later would become home to a second vanguard medical school which is jefferson, and we'll talk about that a little later. but to give you an idea of what philadelphia was like at this time period -- a period i loved researching -- i'm going to bring up a local poet who has been on the scene for 11 years here k and he's going to read a little bit about what 19th century was like. please welcome up to the stage

jeff knight. [applause] >> so i started reading the book, and i was, you know, struck with, you know, this dashing, handsome, charming figure, and then cristin asked me if i would come read, and i thought, well, of course. [laughter] and then i looked at the passage she sent. chapter 11, "the root ofbe the problem." crushing poverty had become an everyday fixture of philadelphia life. one neighborhood, the relatively small area between 5th and 8th streets from lombard to fitz water had become so crammed that it earned the nickname the infected district. a reporter from the evening bulletin investigated the harrowing neighborhood and found conditions among the 4-5,000 people who lived there so wretched that he felt incapable of reporting their full horrors to his readers.

this area of the city, less than a mile from where jefferson medical college held its classes, seemed like the different world from the rarefied circles in which the doctors of the city drank imported french wine while dining on oysters and ice cream. in the infected district, it was common practice for shops to charge a penny for a meal that was made up entirely of scraps bagged from the -- i'm sorry, excuse me. entirely of scraps bagged at the back doors of the wealthy. unarable to afford rent at even the lowliest of slophouses, it was a common custom to secure a room at a boarding house for 12 and a half cents a day and then sublet as many sleeping spaces as could fit at the bargain price of two cents a head. the police and fire department at the time were of little help. the police were known as watchmen because the uniformed men could and often did lock

themselves in specially-constructed watch boxes to protect themselves from the same criminals from which they were supposed to be protecting the community. the watch box method would be abandoned, however, when rioting mobs realized they could simply destroy the watch boxes and kill the police officers. [laughter] the fire department was equally troubled. the all-volunteer companies were neighborhood based, and just like the neighborhoods they had sworn to protect, some were very respectable while others were the reverse, as one doctor later observed: the more humble and gentle the name of the fire fighting company, the more apt it was to be pugnacious, he recalled. for instance, the goodwill would fight anything at any time. foundries, factories and mills of all kinds could be found within the city's borders. there were mills for spinning cotton and weaving wool, factories that built locomotives, fire engines and

chandeliers. the factories that philadelphia produced at their height nearly one-fourth of the nation's steel, and the city's 12 sugar refineries made it the country's largest commercial supplier of sugar. to keep this extraordinary confluence of businesses going, these factories, mills and foundries needed workers. but the city's exploding population always seemed to contain more eager workers than were needed. philadelphians were often forced by circumstance to accept abysmal wages for what invariably proved to be long hours of relentlessly grueling work. unskilled factory operatives, coal heaves, shipyard workers and carpenters were paid less than a $a day to work a dollar a day. most factories recognized only fourth of july as a holiday and vacation and sick time were, of course, nonexistent. men had to compete not only with each other for these

back-breaking jobs, but with children as well. in a time before laws prohibited child labor, factory and mill owners were happy to put even the youngest children to work. in one dramatic case, the glass works near kensington employed 300 people in its industrial plant. of those 300 employees, 225 were boys, some not yet 8 years of age. young girls were not exempt from the furious maw of factory work. the area's matchstick factories in particular sought them out paying a wage of $2.50 a week. the girls happily took the work to help keep food on their families' tables, having no idea, of course, that they were being slowly poisoned by the dangerous chemicals. they worked long hours in poorly-p ventilated -- poorly-ventilated rooms. so difficult to see and keep track of in the dark factory setting, and what would start out as simply a tooth ache and

painful, swollen gums would swiftly evolve into rotting tissue. soon the girls' jaws were covered with large, weeping abscesses so deep the bone could be seen, and the wound would unremittingly leak a foul-smelling discharge. the condition became so common it would eventually earn a nickname, phossy jaw. and if the slow disfigurement with accompanying brain damage and inevitable organ failure weren't horrific enough, the chemicals the workers ingested daily caused the exposed jawbones of these now-deformed girls to glow greenish white in the dark. despite all the advancements of the time, the medical profession simply could not keep up with the increasingly deadly health challenges that this newly industrialized city presented. and one of its largest failings was in women's health. [applause]

>> thank you. the father of two daughters, so i'm sorry to give the horrifying job. i was really obsessed with working class health, and i knew that would be what my family did back then. but back to the medical world. so mutter entered this chaotic city filled with disease, deformity and troublemakers and studied medicine at the university of pennsylvania. but to sort of understand what studying medicine looked like, i'm going to give you an example. this is an illustration of what they would use to teach people about the human body in a time before cadavers and live patients in front of medical schools were being used. so this is one of four images that you would typically see. one would be the man with the skin on in the same pose, next skin off. you can see he's holding his own skin in his hand. next would be the muscles removed, and you would see the organs underneath, and the last one would be the skeleton. and this is what you would use in order to understand the human

body back in the medical field at that time period. but jefferson medical college, which i discussed before, introduced a new concept to medical studies at that time period which was the clinic. to bring live patients in and show the students how to treat them in realtime and in real situations. and here's an example of a photo of the anatomy course at jefferson medical college. the man in the middle, william henry, was actually a student of mutter's. and this is them dissecting a body. no one wants to look at this while i talk, but it just gives you an example of the difference between learning, what you had previously learned and what this new one would be like. mutter was particularly obsessed with people with severe deformities. he got his medical degree at the university of pennsylvania and immediately went to where he knew the best surgeries were happening which was paris,

france. paris, france, all of its citizens got free health care, and because of that the hospital system was funded and very specialized. one of my favorite facts about the parisian medical system at that time period was that you would, you know, hospitals just for laboring women, just for old to people, and you had two hospitals just for the treatment of syphilis. one for women -- which was horrendous -- and the other for men which had a better success rate, but a funny little thing you had to agree to prior to being accepted for treatment at the syphilis hospital, you had to be whipped publicly as punishment for contracting syphilis. and you would enter the hospital, go through several months of grueling treatment, and as soon as you were perfectly healthy, you would be whipped publicly again just so that you knew you learned your lesson. [laughter] but among the things that were happening that were brand new to mutter at this time period was a burgeoning new field called operation plastic, or as we know, plastic surgery. now, we think of it in modern times as maybe lip augmentation

or nose jobs, but actually it literally means plastic. you use your own body to heal any sort of deformities or defects that happened to you either through birth or by accident. and this was an absolutely new field because, as you might not know, all the surgeries taking place in this time period were done prior to the discovery of anesthesia. so all of the people going through these surgeries were absolutely wide awake. in fact, they had men who were in charge of just holding the person down as they struggled and thrashed against the surgeons. so usually you did not agree to a surgery unless it was life or death. so elective surgeries, which a lot of plastic surgeries would be, were very rare. this was a time before germ theory, as i mentioned before, so if you were lucky enough to survive being -- having surgery done on you awake, it was very common for you to die of infection. just to give you an example of how bad it was, for every one soldier that died in the civil war on the battlefield, two died in the hospital from infections

from their wounds. so that's how tremendous infections were. so to have men who could perform and heal people with deformities such as the one you see on the board was absolutely revolutionary and not happening in america, and mutter wanted to bring it back. the one in the center was a woman in france who grew a horn from the center of her forehead and was increasingly hiding it with lower veils. but a surgeon found her out, and it was successfully removed. the wax model of this is from mutter's own collection, and you'll read about it in the first chapter of the book. this is ap example of a mutter -- an example of a mutter flap surgery, a man whose nose was left off either through accident, or sometimes you would lose a nose through syphilis, and this one we'll definitely talk about more, it's a woman with severe burns which was surprisingly common during this time period. so mutter had two things going for him. he was extremely talented and ambitious in terms of surgery. he was ambidextrous, was quick

and knew inherently about cleanliness and fast did yousness, and he knew the difference between a dirty doctor and a clean doctor and how that would affect him. so he was fastidious about it. and he was also extremely empathetic at a time period when there was this emotional detach between doctors and patients. which to be honest, i know we still struggle with it today, but back then you have to imagine, you know, i think when we think about someone falling off a leg while you're still -- sawing off a leg while you're still awake, our instinct is to be the person whose leg is sawed off, and we would hate that. knowing that you would have to cause this pain in order to do what needed to be done. you had to have emotional detachment. but mutter did not have that quality. he trusted people and wanted to be clear, have them join him on the journey of these surgeries which made him so popular. he came back to philadelphia to try to make a name for himself and become a professor and

clashed a lot with another doctor there who is sort of the main antagonist of the story which is guy. this is jefferson medical college, and this is charles d.meggs. now, they both -- so jefferson medical college, as we discussed before, was a vanguard medical institution bringing new things to the forefront such as surgical clinics and patient clinics. they also brought some of the most brilliant minds in surgery and medicine at that time period to one faculty. but the problem is, they were all crazy geniuses who did not want to work with each other, and in my research i found tales of fistfights at faculty meetings -- [laughter] and they would go to each other's surgeries and heckle each other. [laughter] so jefferson had enough, fired the entire faculty and decided the bring back one that more aligned with their vision and unity. and it just so happened that mutter was selected as the chair of surgery, the youngest person there at age 31. he had gotten his medical degree

at 21, and the oldest member of the faculty would be charles d. meggs who took over as chair of obstetrics. and, again, they had clashed before, and there'd be much clashing to come. and to give you an idea, i'm going to bring up another local poet who i actually met in new york city when he was at the louder arts reading series in new york, and he is going to read a selection from the chapter that introduces charles meggs. please welcome up whole foods' own eric guerrieri. [cheers and applause] >> so, yes, when cristin asked me to do this -- [laughter] she introduced this piece as a terrifically misogynystic excerpt from a medical lecture from this gentleman, dr. meggs. and i was a little taken aback.

[laughter] what made you think i would be so perfect for this particular excerpt? >> [inaudible] >> oh, maybe that's it. all right. so dr. meggs. the woman grimaced, her sex opened to the classroom full of young men. see this unobvious, apparently vile lump of animal texture, dr. charles d. meggs asked his students, gesturing to the woman's genitals? here in the inner court of the temple of the body, how can you study this subject sufficiently? women possess a peculiar trait; it is modesty. he continued as he walked, and he firmly placed another pillow between the woman's legs.

it is one of her most charming attributes. but scan her position in civilization, and it is easy to perceive that her intellectual force is different from that of her master and lord, and i say her master and lord, and it is true to say so, he continued as he casually repositioned the woman for maximum exposure. moving her buttocks to the edge of the table, pushing her constitutions at right -- thighs at right angles to her quaking trunk. the great administrative faculties are not hers, he continued. she planned no sublime campaigns, nor leads armies to battle or fleets to victory. in society she is still in bonds, manacled by custom and politics. >> e composes no iliad, do you think that a woman could have developed in the tender soil of her intellect the strong idea of

a hamlet or of a mcbeth? no. [laughter] meggs walked to the table which displayed the tools of his trade; speck lumbars and scalpels, powders, a stack of handkerchiefs and a large jar of properly starved leeches. he dipped his fingers in a bowl of olive oil and rubbed them slowly together as he looked back at the woman. such is not woman's province; nature, power, nor mission. she reigns in the heart, her seat and throne are by the hartestone. the household altar is her place of worship and service, he said, walking toward her. she was staring at the wall in front of her, her hands balled on the thin cotton sheet. she has a head too small for intellect, he said, stroking her

hair. but looking to his audience. but it is just big enough for love. dr. meggs. [laughter] [applause] >> that's an actual speech that meggs gave to his students that he was chair of obstetrics for. and i remember when i got to the point where i got to could she conceive of high schoollet or mcbeth, i was like, oh, if you only knew who was writing your story, dude, you'd be so mad! so mad. [laughter] but, again, that was the mindset. that was actually an incredibly common mineset. he was one of the most prominent voices in obstetrics. modesty really prevented women from seeking treatment for their conditions at an early age. they had believed that only their husbands should see their bodies, and they would let their conditions get terrible prior to seeking treatment.

and even when they went to the doctors, they often would be shy about even showing them anything. in fact, the title of the chapter, which is in french, references an exchange that he had with one of his patients which, you know, he was, like, well, i'm going to have to look and see your body in order to assess what's wrong with you, and she said i would rather die than let you see my body. and he said, well, what woman wants, god wants too and just left the room. and that is what he taught his students to do. and that was very different from how mutter treated his students and how he would want to be treated himself. so this is a faculty of 41. this was jefferson's new faculty. mutter's at the top, meggs at the bottom, and they would reign for 15 years unbroken and really influence some of the most transformative parts of medicine that we know. this is the surgical clinic that mutter had access to. it was known as the pit. this was taken the last half of the 19th century, and you could tell that because there's a woman in the room.

women were not allowed in the college except as patients for the duration of mutter's reign there. but he was able to have access to some of the most amazing, innovative material during his time there and was able to do surgery that pushed the boundaries of anything that anybody had experienced. he also fought really hard for two things that he thought was important; pre-operative care and post-operative care which were revolutionary thoughts back then. he fought to have recovery rooms built which they at first turned him down for, but he could not believe what they would do to these patients that he had which was, essentially, no matter how dramatic or delicate the surgery, they were immediately put into an unwashed, unsanitized wagon and then ridden over philadelphia's cobblestones all the way home and dropped off. he refused to let that happen x when they refused to let him build recovery rooms, he rented out rooms above a nearby restaurant and did it himself

until he relented. some of the surgeries, again, revolutionized plastic surgery. we saw this woman, a variation of this woman before. you have to imagine the 19th century. women dressed in very restrictive clothing, many layers, flammable materials, and they cooked in front of an open fire, so it did not take a lot for them to have their outfits to catch, and these women were unable to escape sort of the tower of flame x they would have severe burns on their they can and face. now, this was a time period where women were completely dependent on men. they were not allowed to own property. they could get livelihoods, but it would not be enough to support a family, and frequently, the family would be so embarrassed and so horrified of what was happening that they would hide the women from the doctors and not seek any treatment at all. this was a very common problem for which there was no solution, and so mutter came up with one. now, we know today skin grafting

as a concept to heal these sorts of things, and the earliest days of skin grafting they tried to do it, it did not work. for one, you didn't have cleanliness, so if you're going to just move a piece of skin without washing your hands or tools or the person's face, it would likely rotten. and second, they didn't have the technology to keep the skin healthy. but mutter realized something very important which was if you just kept a little flap of skin attached to the body and then just turned it around, that little flap of skin would help pump and keep that part of the skin alive. and he created something called the mutter flap which is still being used in surgery today. so to give an example of this, he would take the clean, undamaged skin from the shoulder or back, cut out the damaged skin of the woman's throat, face or cheek and then swing it around and reattach it with early sutures. he would then bandage it up and keep it me meticulously clean aa

time when that was not really considered par for the course. meggs actually spoke out against hand washing and tool washing because he said it would to imply that doctors were not gentlemen because all gentlemen are clean men. [laughter] again, stockholm syndrome with that guy, he was such a bastard. [laughter] so also the mindset of the 19th century. one of my favorite phrases that i came across in my research which kind of helped me understand why people would pick up with this was the phrase the stiffer the sock with blood, the prouder the buzzy surgeon. when you -- busy surgeon. you expected surgeons to be covered in the viscera of their former patients as proof they're trustworthy. that's not how i would do it today. my dentist is here, and i would not like that even for him. so mutter would do this, put them in the recovery room and watch these women religiously and would transform them back into human beings.

monster back then was a medical term just like idiot was, so they literally made unmade monsters with this surgery. but again, you have to will be all of this was done while the patients were awake. mutter did not have the influence he thought he should have, and he was very arrogant and wore very thrash shi clothing hope -- flashy clothing hopes to attract attention to himself. one of my favorite stories was one of the wives would comment how mutter would always match his suit to his horse to his cager. so he watched what meggs did, and he decided to publish a textbook. he put it out with robert liston who was sort of the mutter equivalent of england at that time period known as the fastest knife at the west end. he was famous for saying time me, boys, before sawing off legs, he was so quick. and one of my favorite stories was that he performed a leg amputation at the hip that actually killed three people --

[laughter] he had a person holding the man down, and he was cutting off the leg and accidentally cut the assistant's fingers off. the assistant knocked over a tray full of tools and they flew through the air and hit a spectator in the audience b who saw the knife coming at him and thought that he had been hit and died of fright. later, infection would kill both the patient and the assistant, and to this day i they've said this is the only surgery in history with a 300% mortality rate. [laughter] so that was liston. and together they did put out a book that was extraordinarily detailed about the quickest, cleanest and best way to perform these surgeries, and mutter prepared the human body for these events being transparent and clear and getting your patients on your side. but little did he know within a few months of publishing this book, it would become almost obsolete in his mind because of the invention and discovery is

of either anesthesia which was a game changer in the mind of mutter. and one month after ether was discovered in boston, he performed the first surgery in philadelphia at jefferson medical college removing a tumor of a cheek. but within a few months -- weeks, actually, of that happening, his successful ether operation, ether was banned at the hospitals throughout philadelphia because they thought it was a satanic influence, robbing men of their reason. and mutter had to be a huge proponent moving people towards either anesthesia. as patients, i know we all would prefer to be under. but, again, you have to imagine the 19th century mindset. first thing is all doctors were used to performing on patients who were awake, so when you rob that aspect of communicating to your patient, you know to stop the surgery. you don't want them to bleed out. how will they perform without that? number two, medicine was not regulated at that time period. when you got a jar of ether, you

had no idea if you were using too little or too much because each jar was going to be different. so you risked either the person waking up or killing the person. and number three, again, germ theory. without clean hands and tools, just as many people died of infection after ether surgeries than they did with non-ether surgeries. so doctors didn't want to take the risk. and as you might imagine, dr. meggs was anti-ether anesthesia, and while mutter was giving lectures on how to do it properly, meggs would bring in sheep and kill them with ether to prove the dangers of it. he also used to heckle other surgeons in the street saying if are you going to perform an ether surgery today? be they said, yes, he said, well, i hope your patient dies. one of them was so upset that meggs kept saying this to people when he came up to him and said are you performing ether

anesthesia today, he said, yes, and he said i hope you're met at the gates of heaven by a flock of sheep! [laughter] which was a good one, gross. but mutter, again, sort of at that point was, like, forget this, i am not going to focus on publication, i'm not going to focus on the generation of influence makers, i'm going to focus on my students, these new generations, and teach them. it was a golden time but one that would be way too short because he was a very ill man, and he realized he couldn't fight his illness there are, and one of -- forever, and one of the biggest problems he had was hereditary gout. this is actually a specimen of hands affected with gout. you imagine you're a surgeon, these things are very important. mutter went back to paris to see if anything could be done for his condition, and they told him it wasn't a matter of getting better, but a matter of how much time he had to live. they begged him to stay in paris

so they they could take care of, but he wanted to have generations of doctors who would continue to help them. so he went back to philadelphia and spent the last few years of his life doing two things. one, teaching these generations of doctors that he -- they could do everything that he could do which was sort of in conflict. he loved the idea of being a singular genius, the one person who could help these people, but he realized how damaging that would be to this population, and so he began to say you just have to be a hard worker and to listen to people. and there's many beautiful lectures that illustrate that. the book actually has over 80 illustrations in it, and every single wood cut that you see is an actual patient of mutter's. he unfortunately died very young at age of 47, and the second thing he wanted to make sure would happen is that his collection of unusual medical specimens would be collected. now, again, you have to think of the 19th century. we didn't have photographs, and we didn't have, obviously, film

cameras. so the only time that you would be able to see something unusual, something that might only happen two or three times in your career was if you collected it in a jar or in a wax model or in a strange illustration. and mutter had thousands of these unusual specimens, and he found a home and created the mutter museum in philadelphia which we all now know. and this is what it looks like today. that's mutter, his portrait, in the corner. right next to it is the cabinet that they dedicated to my research of book which i'm really happy about. this little thing right here is a foot that i thought was a wax model and sort of was like, hey, look at this! and they were like, that's a real foot. [laughter] so when i die of a 19th century foot disease, know that i died doing what i love which was, i don't know, touching dirty feet. [laughter] and to close out this talk i'm going to read the reaction section of the book. -- the last section of this book. starts with a quote of one of my favorite speeches of thomas

denton mutter. thank you again for coming out, austin, you're so beautiful. this world is no place of rest, thomas mutter taught his students. it is no place of rest, i repeat, but for effort. steady, continuous, undeviating effort. 150 years after his death, thomas denton mutter's legacy does not rest. it lives on in the surgical techniques he created which are still being used today and the institutions created by the young men who learned from him what it meant to be a good physician. and his namesake museum, the mutter museum in philadelphia. there, for the modest price of admission, you can stand in front of a giant skeleton or marvel at a colon the size of a small cow extracted from a man known only as the human balloon. or, of course, peer into the face of the french widow who one day grew a horn from her forehead and whose wax model bewitched mutter so much, he

carried it with him across an ocean. there you'll find the soap lady, her body having turned into a waxy, soap-like substance after her death, freezing her small face into what looks like a perpetual scream. over the past century and a half, the museum's collection has grown to include tumors cut from presidents, jarred brains of mad men and geniuses, deformed skeletons displayed in delicate glass cases, civil war surge call tools -- surgical tools still caked in dried blood and even the famous side show act, a pair of conjoined brothers who inspired the term siamese twins. all of this and more can be found under one roof, and all of it watched over by the one dashing portrait of thomas denton mutter. thus, in diagnose, his old friend would say of the museum, he has left a precious heritage to the profession. and what started out as a public home for his ambitious private collection has now evolved into

one of the most popular science museums in the united states where tens of thousands of people flock every year to be intrigued and awed and provoke ised by its fantastic collection of artifacts. and like mutter himself, the museum challenges its visitors to see past their own shock and initial revulsion and instead find the humanity of the peoples whose remains are on display. while these bodies may be ugly, the late mutter museum curator gretchen warden once wrote, there is a terrifying beauty in the spirit of those forced to endure these afflictions. and every week fresh groups of scientists and doctors come to the museum and its library to study its holdings, unlock its clues and perhaps help its long-dead founder to finish his timeless mission, to alleviate human suffering. it was a goal mutter believed was possible and one that he believed all people should strive regardless of background, birth, skill or innate talent.

place no dependence on your genius, even if you possess it. great talents, industry will immove them. if you have but moderate talent, nothing is denied to well directed labor, and nothing is obtained without it. he taught his students. and believed it applied to everyone, including and especially himself. this is no place of rest. our work should never be done, and it is the daydream of ignorance to look forward to that as a happy time when we shall wish for nothing more and have nothing more to accomplish. thank you very much. [applause] thank you. i'm going to drink my water. so i think we're having a q&a? >> we are. >> so if nip has any questions -- if anyone has any questions, if anyone has anything they want me to look at

and give you 19th century medical advice, i do have leeches in the back. [laughter] yes. >> hello. >> hello. hello. >> so i'm curious if your research, since you were working on book for so long, if any of the facts or imagery ever sort of found its way into your poetry. you're a poet. [laughter] >> so i am. i did write six books of poetry at a pretties based here in -- at a press based here in austin. and some of the images did work their way in there, but i i found the influence of poetry into this project to be greater. i think poetry really teaches you to take one sort of situation or action or event and tease out a larger meaning of how it would have a greater value. and that's really helpful in research, because you're able to see something and go, wow, this is such a metaphor for what would happen later and be able to present it that way. and also i'm a part of the

poetry slam community which austin has had for a very long time, and if you don't know, you perform your work live in front of people who are looking at you. and i think that also that made me really aware of telling a complete story to make sure that all the voices i could find could be represented in this book. so there are stories of working class, stories of women, stories of people of color to make sure that it's not just all about these pretty privileged doctors. mutter obviously had his struggles, but, you know, people had it a lot worse during that time period. i think my background in poetry also made me realize how many other voices needed to be captured in the story. great question, great outfit. [laughter] any other questions? oh! this fantastic looking gentleman in the back. be. [inaudible] [laughter] >> it's for c-span. >> hey. >> hi. >> so at what point did surgeons

become really elite in terms of their income? at that time was surgery still or surgeons and medicine still really highly regarded and paid, etc., etc. >> that is a great question, and i also want to acknowledge -- please, give a big round of applause to the man who did the amazing cover of my book, the incredible dan winters. [applause] so, and he's got a fantastic beard that is very civil war-esque, so i'm a big fan of beards. [laughter] in terms of surgery, i will say this about 19th century surgery. 19th century medicine in general, where you came in as a station in life really helped you in every other area except for surgery. if you wanted to be a family doctor or obstetrician, obviously, it would really be helpful to be a wealthy person to attract other wealthy people to trust you. but surgery, you just wanted whoever was quick, clean and

could get the job done, and it didn't matter where they came from. your rich buddy doing a slow amputation is not what you want, but some guy who grew up on the bad side of tracks that could do it and have you survive the surgery was the one you wanted. it was the one field of medicine where you could really be judged on your skill and not who you were born into. and he did make a very good living, but he did not really take time -- other than his fantastic clothing -- to enjoy it. one of the things he set up was a hospital, essentially jefferson medical college, and fought to have it be open year round and not just when school was open. so that took up most of his life. but he did make a good living, and they did pay well even back then. all right. >> hello. writing something for over ten years is an incredible milestone.

what was your sort of motivation to help you through that process? >> thank you. that's a great question. so, yeah, i first walked into the mutter museum archive 15 years ago this december. but i was, i will say this, the reason it took so long was in large part because of my own insecurities as a writer. i was largely self-taught. i've never studied nonfiction writing, never studied history, let alone medical history, and i came across this story which i thought was so fascinating, and i loved doing the research for it, but i thought they wouldn't let a person like me write a book like this. i don't have a background, i don't have a mfa. so just for years i would tinker with it and go someone's going to write this book x it's going to be so good. and then i put out my first nonfiction book which is "words in your face" which was a 20-year history of the new york city poetry slam. now, that was a contemporary history, and i was a figure in it. but still, pulling together all of these disparate narratives into one story, that took five

years, and i said if i can do this, why not? why not me? if no one's telling this story, and he was an incredible man whose story should be told, and no one else is doing it, why not me? and i went to the mutter museum and talked to the director of the museum, robert hicks, an incredible man. if you've ever seen youtube channel of the mutter museum, they have additional leeches that need to be fed human blood, and so he, every six months he does a youtube video of him feeding these leeches his own blood. [laughter] that is one devoted museum director. and he welcomed me in. you know, i'd worked with the previous director, gretchen warden, who passed away in 2004, and he said anything you need for us, we'll do. together we put out grant applications, and the university of pennsylvania gave me a yearlong residency in order to write and research this book, i was able to get a residency at a house after that which brought me here to austin. so it's a matter of putting yourself out there, you know?

and saying this is something i feel passionate about, and i want to do it. and if i had done that earlier, the book would have been written quicker, but i really had to fight through my own insecurities. so i'm so grateful for the wealth of support in the art and science communities, and i'm really proud of the end product. so, again, a lot of it has to do when it comes to writing projects your own insecurity saying you can't do this, no one will read it and, you know, believe me, i've had my low moments. i was in between residencies at ernie's house and sleeping on my friend's house, and i was like, okay, it's going to be great, i'm writing this book about medical oddities! and someone will publish it, it's all cool. and she's like, you're not doing great. [laughter] but it all worked out. so even in your low moments, you know, keep moving forward and keep doing the stuff that's valuable to you. this was a strange story. i'm sort of a strange b person to tell it, but it all happened the way it had to be.

it's a good question. [applause] so i think that's probably it. i'm going the start -- thank you so much, austin. thank you, book people. [cheers and applause] and i'll be over here. [applause] >> yeah, we can start the signing now. if you have purchased a book, then you can start lining up this way towards the elevator. [laughter] [inaudible conversations] >> thank you. >> every weekend booktv brings you 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2. keep watching for more television for serious readers. here's a look at some of the best selling nonfiction books according to indiebound. at the top of the list, fox news

anchor bill o'reilly and historian martin dugard's account of the circumstances surrounding general george patton's death in "killing patton." second, randall roe in "what if?" followed by oprah winfrey's "what i know for sure." next, naomi klein comments on climate change and the free market in "this changes everything" followed by former secretary of state henry kissinger's take on international affairs. eric schmidt and jonathan rosenberg, adviser to ceo larry page, are seventh with "how google works." in eighth place, the founder of paypal analyzes the value of start-up companies in his book "zero to one." it's followed by the recount of the 1879 u.s. naval expedition to the north pole in "the kingdom of