In Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine, author Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz chronicles the remarkable life of Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter (1811-1859): a dazzling, young American surgeon who was so flamboyant and audacious that he wore colorful silk suits to perform surgery, embellished his last name with an umlaut, and was described as the “[P.T.] Barnum of the surgery room.” Rising to the challenges of performing surgery on the severely deformed while they remained awake (as was the standard practice) — and when others viewed them as only as “monsters” — Mütter was a revolutionary figure whose compassion-based philosophies and innovative surgical ideas and breakthroughs clashed with the constraints of his time. The vast collection of medical oddities he amassed to serve as teaching tools for his enormously popular lectures as a professor of medicine would later become the foundation for one of the most (in)famous museums in the world: Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz was born and raised in Philadelphia, and first visited the Mütter Museum during a class trip in the fourth grade. A decade and half later, her feature-length biographical screenplay, Mütter, won screenwriting awards at the Hampton International Film Festival and Philadelphia Film Festival, and earned her a Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, directly inspiring her to research and write this book. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Year of No Mistakes, as well as the nonfiction book, Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam. Her recent awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the ArtsEdge Writer-in-Residency at the University of Pennsylvania and the Amy Clampitt House residency. She lives in Austin, TX.