Book almost that entire time she is we have known each other. She started screenwriting at nyu and discovered this story. Root this amazing screenplay about it that get made into a short film as one of the awards for the contest which she won which you can you on my youtube page. I think it is amazing and a hint of what an amazing movie. But after she won the screenplay award she did not give up on the story. It is one of the longest times ive ever known any of my friends to work on a project, and the culmination of it is so amazing. So far it has won several awards and people are just raving about it. I am so proud of her. Cristin okeefe aptowicz, everyone. [applause] thanks, everybody. So welcome to the dr. Mutter event here at polk people buried am so thrilled to be here. I move toward a finish writing this book because i got a grant to support writing this book. Live in new york city, and 25,000 does not pay anything in new york city, but it does in austin. Thank you for your cheap breakfast tacos. Theyre affordable public transportation. So today i will do something a little unusual. I will give you talk about what i love about dr. Thomas dent mutter and have local poets read excerpts from the book so that you get a taste of what the book is like. We will try to do this as quickly as possible because i am excited about the subject matter. So i can take a long time. There are some glory images, as i apologize in advance if you anything that was read for dinner. The book is about dr. Thomas dent mutter. Some of you may know. It is an nicole destination, a museum for medical oddities. They would say unusual pathological specimens. But i grew up in philadelphia and went to the museum in the fourth grade, sixth grade, eight great, and all throughout my school never knowing the story of why it was founded. That is what got me interested in a story that i wrote in dr. Mutters marvels. So dr. Thomas dent mutter was born in 1811 to these beautiful people. They were very welloff virginians, very successful merchants. His wife was very well read and they had two sons. Tom and then james. But within seven years the entire family except for tom died which was not any of a neat not unusual. You would have Infectious Diseases that would ravage of families, towns, and cities. The grandmother passed away. The judge to find a home forum, but eventually found a home here in sabine all which is, of a cane Carter Family of the south, if any of you remember that. And Robert Carter with his guardian. He supported his education but not what he considered to be incredibly important which was his clothing. Even as an orphan he wanted to look really great. Emblematic of the person he would later become. He realized what he could perform, charges closing bell captain of his school and then arent scholarships to pay off. So he began just charging all this money. He got a velvet vests and cigars and like what hats and just kept turning academic scholarships to pay off. It did not work for very long. A stop giving him money, and he got a lot of trouble. He struggled with illnesses entire life. They did not have antibiotics back then. Germ theory would not be present and to later. Infectious diseases could hit you again and again. He was in college when he decided he wanted to be more ambitious and go to yale. He had never experienced the northern winter then was just constantly coughing up blood. He came back south to get a diagnosis and met with doctors on like any he had never 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 just put a placard out and that was it. Common treatments were approaching, leaching, drinking mercury was also very popular. And sometimes the treatments may do even sicker than if he 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 a person whos suffering needs to be alleviated. That became is calling. He knew that he wanted to be a doctor. And if you were to study medicine earlier in america he was steady it here in philadelphia, the place where i was born. It does not look like this anymore, but it did during his time. The home of the firstever medical school. The university of pennsylvania founded by Benjamin Franklin and later would become home to a second Vanguard Medical school edges jefferson, and we will talk about that later. But to give you an idea of what philadelphia looked like during this time, i will bring a political poet who has been on the scene for 11 years here. He will read a little bit about what 19th century was like. Welcome up to the stage jet night. [applause] i started reading the book and i was struck with this dashing, handsome, charming figure. And then christian asked me if i would come rita and i thought, well, of course. Then i looked at the passage she sent. Chapter 11, the root of the problem. Crushing poverty had become an everyday fixture of philadelphia life. One neighborhood, the relatively small area between fifth and eighth streets had become so cramped with the citys most degraded glasses that he earned the nickname the infected district. A reporter from the evening bulletin invest deeded that neighborhood and found conditions among the people live there so wretched that he felt incapable of reporting their followers to his readers. This area of the city less than 1 mile from where Jefferson Medical College of glasses, seemed like a different world from the rarefied circles in which the doctors of the city drink imported french wine while dining and oysters and icecream and in the infected district it was common practice for shops to charge a penny for a meal that was made up entirely of scraps excuse me, entirely of the scraps back at the back doors of the wealthy. Unable to afford rent at even the lowliest of flophouses of it was a common custom for one enterprising individual to secure a room at a boarding have swelled in assets a day and then sublet as many sleeping spaces as good fit at the bargain price of 0. 2 ahead. 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 there were supposed to be protecting the community. Watch box method would be abandoned, however, rioting mobs realize that they could simply destroy the watch boxes and kill the police officers. The Fire Department was equally troubled. The all volunteer companies were neighborhood based, and just like the neighborhoods they had sworn to protect, some are very respectable, while others were the reverse as one doctor later observed to be the more humble and gentle the name of the firefighting company the more apt it was to be pugnacious, he recalled. For instance, the goodwill except would fight anything at any time. Foundries, factories, and mills of all kinds to be found within the borders. Factories that build locomotives, fire engines. The factory produced nearly onefourth of the nations steel and this citys 12th sugar refineries made it the countrys largest single supplier of commercial share. To keep this extraordinary conference of business is going these factories, mills, and foundrys needed workers. But this citys exploding population always seemed to contain more eager workers than were needed. Philadelphias were often forced by circumstance to accept abysmal wages for what invariably proved to be long hours of relentless the grueling work rita unskilled factory operatives, cold ivars, Shipyard Workers and carpenters were paid less than a dollar a day to work 14 hours a day six days a week. Most factories recognized only the fourth of july as a holiday and vacation and sick time were, of course, nonexistent. A man had to compete not only with each other for these backbreaking jobs but with children as well. At a time before laws permitted child labor they were happy to put even the youngest children to work. One dramatic case, the glassworks employed 300 people in its industrial plan. Of those 300 employees 225 for boys, some not yet eight years of age. Young girls were not exempt from the furious factory work. The match stick factories south and not paying a wage of 2. 50 per week. Happy to they happily took to work. No idea that they were being slowly poisoned by the factories dangerous chemicals. The girls worked long hours and poorly ventilated rooms licking their own chemical coating figures often to help in processing so many small slivers of wood so difficult to see and keep track of in the dark factory setting. And what would start out as simply a toothache and painful, stolen guns would swiftly evolve into rodding tissue. Soon the girls jaws were covered with large, weeping abscesses so deep that the bone could be seen and the wound would unremittingly bleak a foul smelling discharge. The condition became so, and it would eventually earn a nickname , fosse giacomo fact phosphorus being the active ingredients. And if the slow disfigurement with accompanying brain damage and inevitable organ failure were not terrific enough, the chemicals that the workers in just a daily cost the exposed jawbones of these now deformed girls to glow greenish white in the dark. Despite all the advancement of the time the medical profession it simply could not keep up with the increasing Deadly Health challenges that this newly industrialized city presented. [applause] the father of two daughters. Im sorry. I grew up working class in philadelphia. And i knew that that would be what my family did back then. Back to the medical world. So dr. Mutter into this chaotic city filled with disease, deformity, and troublemakers and studied medicine at the university of pennsylvania but he understood what it meant what it looked like. I will give you an example. This is what it will be to teach people about the human body in a time before cadavers. So this is one of four images you would typically see. The man with this can on, next skin off, holding his own skin in his hand. The muscles removed and you could see the organs. The last one would be the skeleton. This is what you would use in order to understand the human body back in the medical field at that time. Jefferson Medical College introduced a new concept for medical studies of that time which was the clinic. To bring live patients in and show the students how to treat them in real time and real situations. Here is an example of a photo of the anatomy course at Jefferson Medical College. The man in the middle, William Henry was a student. And this is but this gives you an example of the difference between learning, what was previously learned and what this new one would be like. Particularly obsessed with people with severe deformity. He studied and got a medical degree at the university of pennsylvania and immediately went to wear a the best surgeries are happening which was paris, france. Paris, france, all of its citizens got Free Health Care and because of that possible system was founded and very specialized. One of my favorite facts about the parisian medical system was that if you have hospitals just belaboring women. One was for women. You had to be whipped pump publicly as punishment for contracting syphilis. You enter the hospital. Go through several months of treatment and as soon as you were perfectly healthy you would be whipped publicly again to so that you knew you lender lesson. But among the things i were happening that were bare brand new was a burgeoning new field called operation plastique or as we know Plastic Surgery. We think about it in modern times. But Plastic Surgery and literally means use your own body to heal any kind of deformities or defects that happened by birth or by accident. This was an absolutely knew field because as you might not know caught all the surgerys were done prior to the discovery of amnesty ship. Of the people going through these surgeries were absolutely wide awake. Men were in charge of just holding the persons down as they struggle and crashed against a certain. Usually you did not agree to a surgery unless it was like for death. So elective surgery which a lot of blacks Plastic Surgery would be was very rare. If you were lucky enough to survive having surgery done on you while awake it was common for you to die of infection. To give you an example of how bad it was, for every one soldier died of a civil war on the battlefield, to die in the hospital from infection. That is how tremendous infections or. So to have men who could perform and heal people was absolutely revolutionary and was not happening in america. He wanted to bring it back. So the one in the center, a woman in france who grew order from the center of their fire and hit it from increasingly. A surgeon found around and it was successfully removed. You will read about that in the first chapter of the book. This is an example of a surge in which we can talk about before. Accidence, and then this one we will talk about more, woman with severe burns which was surprisingly common during his time. So he had two things going for him. He was an extremely talented and ambitious in terms of surgery. He was ambidextrous, quick, and apparently about cleanliness at a time before adjournment germ theory was proven probably because he was a patient himself and the the difference between an dirty doctor and a clean doctor and how that would affect him. And he was also when there was this emotional detachment between doctors and patients. I know we still struggle to deal with that, but back then you have to imagine, when we think about someone falling off alleged wife is still awake, our instinct is be the person his leg is being sought off. But imagine being the person who spent years of their lives studying to help heal people knowing that he would have to cause this pain in order to do what needed to be done . You had to have emotional detachment. But he did not have that quality he trusted people and wanted to be clear, have been joined him on that journey which made him so popular. He came back to philadelphia to try to make a name firms often become a professor and clashed a lot with another doctor who is the main antagonist of the story. This guy. This is Jefferson Medical College. This is charles de make. Now, they both Jefferson Medical College, a Vanguard Medical institution bringing new things to the forefront such as surgical and patient clinics. They also brought some of the most Brilliant Minds in surgery and medicine at that time to one faculty. The problem is, they were all crazy geniuses he did not did not want to work with each other. In my research i found tales of fist fights and faculty meetings. It would go to each other surgerys and heckle each other. Jefferson fired the entire faculty and decided to bring back one more aligned with the vision and unity. Just so happened that dr. Mutter was selected as the chair of surgery, the youngest person there at age 31. If that his medical degree at 21, and the oldest member of the faculty would be charles de needed to cover as chair of the obstetrics, be they had clashed before and there would be much to come. To give you an idea of how he was different i will bring up another local poet who was in new york city. He is going to read a selection from the chapter that introduces him. Please welcome up austins own, whole foods own eric great. [applause] yes. When cresson asked me to do this she introduced this piece as terrifically misogynistic excerpt from a medical lecture from this gentleman to my doctor makes and i was a little taken back. What made you think would be so perfect with this particular excerpt . So the woman grimmest, open to the classroom full of young men. See this an obvious apparently via a lump of animal texture . He as his collection of his gesturing to the womens units else. Here in the inner court of the temple of the body how can you studied the subject sufficiently . Women possess a peculiar traits that is modesty. He continued as he walked and he firmly placed another pillow between the womans legs. It is one of her most charming attributes. The scan her position and civilization and it is easy to perceive that her intellectual force is different from that of her master and lord. Nsa her master and large, 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 thighs at right angles to her quaking truck. The great administrative faculties are not hers, he continued. She plans no sublime campaigns nor leads armies to battle or sleeps to victory. In society she is still in bonds, medical by custom and politics. She composes no eleatic, no ennead. To you think that a woman could have developed in that tender soil of her intellect the strong idea of a hamlet or of on the press . No. [laughter] he walks to the table which display the tools of his trade, speculums and scalpels, tinctures and powders, aztec of handkerchiefs and a large jar of properly starred leeches. He dipped his fingers in a bowl of olive oil and rubber them slowly together as he looked back at the woman. Such is not a womans province, nature, power, nor mission. She wins in the heart, her seat in thrown are but the hard stone. The household altar is our pleasure of place of worship and Service Walking toward her. Staring at the wall in front of her, her hands balled on the thin cotton sheet. She has a head to small for intellect stroking her hair but looking to his audience. But it is just big enough for love. [applause] that is an actual speech that he made to the students here. I remember when he got to the part, conceive of hamlet or macbeth. Nope. If you only knew who was writing your story. You would be so mad. Some bad pitches again, hoff there was actually an incredibly common mind set. He was one of the most prominent voices in obstetrics and he had to look at it through the 19th century. Immodesty really prevented woman women from seeking treatment for their conditions generally age. They believe that only there has been should see their bodies. Even when they went to the doctors, they often would be shy about even showing them anything. The title of the chapter reverences and exchange she had with one of his patients. He was like, well, i have to look and see your body in order to assess what is wrong wi