I've visited the Mutter Museum many times. This books gave me so much extra insight into the history of who Mutter was and how the museum came into being!

I received Dr. Mutter’s Marvels free as a Good Reads First Read Book.

The blurb promised the book to be fascinating and riveting, giving a good glimpse into American medicine in the 19th Century and how Doctor Thomas Mutter impacted it.

First, the book starts off with a medical oddity that Mutter encounters while aboard ship to France. It’s a good hook to get you interested but medical oddities were far more common at that time then they are today.

You get a bit of Mutter’s biography, which is what I thought the book would be about, but the author skips parts or starts with one thing and then goes off on something completely different. And other individuals get introduced but their introduction seems out of place.

Many chapters could have been combined. A better history of medicine and the medical profession in America would have helped, which could have easily been a chapter unto itself. Plus, a general history of Philadelphia and a quick history of medicine in England and France would also have been beneficial. The text didn’t seem to flow chronologically but rather meandered wherever the author wanted it to. Dr. Mutter may have had a big impact on 19th Century American medicine but you don’t get that impression from the book.

I felt rather cheated. I was promised a biography of a game changer and what I got was just another biography. You could almost have made it a history of the Faculty of ’41 (Jefferson School of Medicine, 1841) which would have been much more interesting and would have made much more sense. Things would have been more tied together, events would have flowed more smoothly, and a lot more material could have been added.

Overall, it wasn’t a bad book. It just needed more work to make it better. ( )

I had no idea that this man was such an important part of advancing early American medicine. This book gave me a deep appreciation for Dr. Mütter’s humanity, industriousness, and genius. Now I am planning a trip to his Museum. ( )

I loved visiting the Mutter museum and this book brought me back there. It was full of the interesting oddities Mutter collected and his personal story. Worth reading for anyone who is interested in early medicine or odd things. ( )

One of those books that almost seems to be more tangent than narrative - and I was really surprised at how little the author focuses on the medical oddities collected by Mütter and more on a somewhat conventional biography (which is perfectly interesting, to be sure). ( )