Mütter Museum

Mütter Museum
Author: Mütter Museum
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN:

The first book on the Mütter Museum contain artful images of the museum's fascinating exhibits shot by contemporary fine art photographers. Here, the focus is on the museum's archive of rare historic photographs, most of which have never been seen by the public. Featured are poignant, aesthetically accomplished works ranging from Civil War photographs showing injury and recovery, to the ravages of diseases not yet conquered in the 19th century, to pathological anomalies, to psychological disorders. Many were taken by talented photographers between the 1860s and the 1940s as records for physicians to share among colleagues and to track patients' conditions, and demonstrate various techniques used in medical photography including the daguerreotype, micrography, X ray, and traditional portrait-style photography. As visual documents of what humans endured in the face of limited medical knowledge, these extraordinary and haunting photographs demonstrate how far medicine has advanced.

Dr. Mutter's Marvels

Dr. Mutter's Marvels
Author: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2015-09-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1592409253

A mesmerizing biography of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country’s most famous museum of medical oddities Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia, performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools—or even wash his hands. This was the world of medicine when Thomas Dent Mütter began his trailblazing career as a plastic surgeon in Philadelphia during the mid-nineteenth century. Although he died at just forty-eight, Mütter was an audacious medical innovator who pioneered the use of ether as anesthesia, the sterilization of surgical tools, and a compassion-based vision for helping the severely deformed, which clashed spectacularly with the sentiments of his time. Brilliant, outspoken, and brazenly handsome, Mütter was flamboyant in every aspect of his life. He wore pink silk suits to perform surgery, added an umlaut to his last name just because he could, and amassed an immense collection of medical oddities that would later form the basis of Philadelphia’s renowned Mütter Museum. Award-winning writer Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz vividly chronicles how Mütter’s efforts helped establish Philadelphia as a global mecca for medical innovation—despite intense resistance from his numerous rivals. (Foremost among them: Charles D. Meigs, an influential obstetrician who loathed Mütter’s “overly modern” medical opinions.) In the narrative spirit of The Devil in the White City, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels interweaves an eye-opening portrait of nineteenth-century medicine with the riveting biography of a man once described as the “[P. T.] Barnum of the surgery room.”

Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Author: Gretchen Worden
Publisher:
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2002
Genre: Medical
ISBN:

Home to over 20,000 mind-boggling anatomic specimens, plaster casts, wax models, and paintings, the Mutter Museum, founded in 1858, is part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. This book features over 100 photographs by a select group of renowned photographers whose work appears in the award-winning Mutter Museum calendars. Highlights include a bust of an early-19th-century Parisian widow with a six-inch horn protruding from the forehead; the connected livers of Chang and Eng, the world-famous Siamese twins; the skeleton of a 7 6 giant from Kentucky; and a collection of 139 skulls showing anatomic variation among ethnic groups in central and eastern Europe. Historical photographs from the museum s archives, brief background texts about the collection, stunning photographs by acclaimed photographers including William Wegman and Joel-Peter Witkinand, and an introductory essay on the museum are also included."

The Mütter Museum

The Mütter Museum
Author: Anna Dhody
Publisher: Schiffer + ORM
Total Pages: 42
Release: 2020-07-28
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1507302576

Join A.J., the Mütter Museum’s junior guide, on a tour of the world’s best-known medical museum. A.J. will take you on a fun and educational adventure through the Mütter’s amazing collection of unique medical specimens and objects. Accompanied by playful illustrations, this look at medical marvels and mysteries will enthrall and inform science lovers of all ages. A.J. has all of your questions covered; from the height of the Giant to the length of the Megacolon. Learn all about how the human body works (or doesn't!), and keep your eyes peeled for some of the museum's most famous see-through residents!

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
Author: Janice P. Nimura
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-01-19
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0393635554

New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography "Janice P. Nimura has resurrected Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell in all their feisty, thrilling, trailblazing splendor." —Stacy Schiff Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician. Exploring the sisters’ allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights—or with each other. From Bristol, Paris, and Edinburgh to the rising cities of antebellum America, this richly researched new biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility for women in medicine. As Elizabeth herself predicted, "a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now."

Boy of Bone

Boy of Bone
Author: K. R. Sands
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2012-04-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780983582748

In this extraordinary narrative and visual collection, twelve stories are crafted out of the imagined lives of actual people. Each story is inspired by an exhibit at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a place of "terrible beauty" (Newsweek) that is "gorgeous and repulsive at once" (The New Yorker).

Dark Archives

Dark Archives
Author: Megan Rosenbloom
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 0374717427

On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world’s most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship. A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives—captivating and macabre in all the right ways—she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.

Bone Rooms

Bone Rooms
Author: Samuel J. Redman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2016-03-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0674969731

A Smithsonian Book of the Year A Nature Book of the Year “Provides much-needed foundation of the relationship between museums and Native Americans.” —Smithsonian In 1864 a US Army doctor dug up the remains of a Dakota man who had been killed in Minnesota and sent the skeleton to a museum in Washington that was collecting human remains for research. In the “bone rooms” of the Smithsonian, a scientific revolution was unfolding that would change our understanding of the human body, race, and prehistory. Seeking evidence to support new theories of racial classification, collectors embarked on a global competition to recover the best specimens of skeletons, mummies, and fossils. As the study of these discoveries discredited racial theory, new ideas emerging in the budding field of anthropology displaced race as the main motive for building bone rooms. Today, as a new generation seeks to learn about the indigenous past, momentum is building to return objects of spiritual significance to native peoples. “A beautifully written, meticulously documented analysis of [this] little-known history.” —Brian Fagan, Current World Archeology “How did our museums become great storehouses of human remains? Bone Rooms chases answers...through shifting ideas about race, anatomy, anthropology, and archaeology and helps explain recent ethical standards for the collection and display of human dead.” —Ann Fabian, author of The Skull Collectors “Details the nascent views of racial science that evolved in U.S. natural history, anthropological, and medical museums...Redman effectively portrays the remarkable personalities behind [these debates]...pitting the prickly Aleš Hrdlička at the Smithsonian...against ally-turned-rival Franz Boas at the American Museum of Natural History.” —David Hurst Thomas, Nature

Mutants

Mutants
Author: Armand Marie Leroi
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2005-01-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1101562765

Visit Armand Marie Leroi on the web: http://armandleroi.com/index.html Stepping effortlessly from myth to cutting-edge science, Mutants gives a brilliant narrative account of our genetic code and the captivating people whose bodies have revealed it—a French convent girl who found herself changing sex at puberty; children who, echoing Homer’s Cyclops, are born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads; a village of long-lived Croatian dwarves; one family, whose bodies were entirely covered with hair, was kept at the Burmese royal court for four generations and gave Darwin one of his keenest insights into heredity. This elegant, humane, and engaging book “captures what we know of the development of what makes us human” (Nature).

The Beauty in Breaking

The Beauty in Breaking
Author: Michele Harper
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-06-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0525537392

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book “Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.” —The New York Times Book Review “An incredibly moving memoir about what it means to be a doctor.” —Ellen Pompeo As seen/heard on Fresh Air, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Weekend Edition, and more An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself. Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. How to let go of fear even when the future is murky: How to tell the truth when it’s simpler to overlook it. How to understand that compassion isn’t the same as justice. As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present. In this hopeful, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along the precious, necessary lessons that she has learned as a daughter, a woman, and a physician.