“It appears our heavenly father in his wisdom does by loss and disappointment wean us gradually from this world and its attractions. Does not this community of suffering bring us nearer to each other? My own fate has been to live among strangers and away from those whom I love best in the world.”
This letter would be the last Mütter would ever write to Carter—a fact that Mütter seemed oddly prescient of.
“Now that I feel the approach of night,” he wrote, “I know that soon I must lie down to sleep until the ‘great day’ when we shall see [God’s] face, and, I trust, rest from our sorrows.”
• • •
But even looming death could not keep Mütter from his determination to ensure that his collection of marvels would find a home. He was relentless in his communications with the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, until finally, in December of 1858, an agreement was struck. An Article of Agreement finalizing the organization’s relationship with Mütter and the creation of the Mütter Museum was, at long last, finally formally and legally recognized. Soon after, Mütter fled the freezing Philadelphia winter for the last time.
Three months later, in the warm air and bright sunshine of his native South, Thomas Dent Mütter died at the age of forty-seven.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE WORLD IS NO PLACE OF REST
In the weeks and months following his death, tributes to Mütter began to appear in journals and newspapers throughout the country.
“This kind and Christian heart, this generous and accomplished physician has at length found the sad relief which his own art denied him here,” read the tribute published in The North American Medico-Chirurgical Review. “Among those to whom he gave that ease from suffering in its manifold varieties, which he sought in vain, there will be many to regret his loss.”
“The telegraph of the 17th heralded over the western world the mournful intelligence of the death of Dr. Thomas D. Mütter, Emeritus College of Philadelphia, at Charleston, South Carolina, on the 17th day of March, 1859,” read the In Memoriam that ran in The Medical and Surgical Reporter. “A brilliant luminary in the great medical constellation—glorious in its own splendor and deriving reflected beauty from revolving planets—has set in the darkness of an endless night. A lifeboat, which long has floated in gracefulness and usefulness, secured in a peaceful haven, and often shot out in the howling storm rescuing many, many a ship-wrecked crew from the perils of a pestilential storm, has been cut loose from its moorings, and has drifted far away into the unknown ocean of Eternity.”
“The subject of this memoir needs no eulogium from us, before the medical profession, and our humble hands would attempt to wreathe no new laurels for his brow,” read the piece in The Medical and Surgical Reporter. “The short life of Doctor Mütter illustrated the most remarkable mental abilities and the gentlest qualities of heart. For years, we have viewed him at what seemed the zenith of professional eminence, and yet he continued struggling under the oppression of the severest bodily infirmities, to elevate the science to which he was devoted and to relieve the miseries of others.”
Mütter’s students, upon hearing the news, shared their memories of their beloved teacher.
“While I recount his manly form and noble bearing, his intellectual face, his kind and genial manner, I convey but a slight conception of that eloquent style and research, wisdom and learning with which his lectures were ever filled—dignity and grace of address—concise and beautiful diction—apt and happy illustrations, which endeared him as a teacher,” L. Beecher Todd, Jefferson Medical College Class of 1854, wrote; “the skill and neatness, tenderness and sympathy characterizing his operations, which embalmed him forever in the hearts of thousands of the purest citizens and best physicians of our country, who sojourned in Philadelphia to enjoy the wisdom and learning which flowed from his elegant lips. This, as well as many acts of personal kindness, justify my affectionate remembrance of him—my teacher, my friend, now no more.”
“In every view of him, he was a ‘good physician,’” Richard J. Levis, Jefferson Medical College Class of 1848, wrote. “His manner hopefully inspired the desponding; his skill raised many from a lingering couch . . . his great name was ever popularly associated with the relief of suffering, the healing of the sick, joyfully leading away the halt, restoring sight to the blind, or soothing the path of the worn and life-weary to eternal rest.”
And with the same breath that his students expressed their undying praise, they also expressed a fearful concern that their late professor might be forgotten.
Todd prayed for an “able hand” to write “the biography of this great and good man” so that it might be “read and remembered, loved, honored and cause the name Thomas Mütter to become a household word of American Surgery.”
“Respect for his memory, and the gratitude an obliged pupil feels for a revered preceptor—and which we had hoped in vain that time would have allowed us in some other manner to evince—are the inducements for this feeble offering,” wrote Levis. “Other and abler pens will write for him, to coming ages, a deathless name, to be forever blended with the history of American Surgery, and to stand as a synonym for professional excellence and munificence.”
“Yet again shall we meet him,” Levis would say, “where preceptor and pupil, physician and patient, shall stand in new relations; where disease shall not corrupt, and pain shall not rack; where the palsied hand shall be freed from its fetters, and the darkened eye opened to the light of the life immortal; where the wan and wasted shall be revived; where hopes wreck not, and where sorrows are unknown!”
When it was time to memorialize Thomas Dent Mütter, Jefferson Medical College asked Joseph Pancoast, his longtime friend and surgical brother in arms, to deliver a speech recounting the late professor’s life and achievements.
“It is indeed impossible for me even now to revert without pain to the loss of this distinguished friend with whom I was so intimately associated,” Pancoast told the gathered crowd of faculty, board, and students, “for, side by side, and step by step, for nearly half an ordinary lifetime, we trod harmoniously together the difficult and somewhat thorny paths of a surgical career.
“Dr. Mütter died early . . . ,” he told his audience, “too early, except in cases of men of rare genius, to afford time for the achievement of the highest professional distinction. Yet no one will deny that he had raised himself to the first rank among the members of his profession, and enjoyed confessedly the highest reputation as a practitioner and a teacher of one of the noblest branches of the healing art.”
Joseph Pancoast
But like Mütter’s former students, Pancoast worried that despite all of Mütter’s achievements, his friend’s life would be forgotten.
“Dr. Mütter raised his reputation to the highest pitch during his life. It may not, however, be so enduring, or go down so far to posterity,” he said, “as if the rich fruits of his life’s labors had been more fully spread in our journals, or been enshrined in books. This was a distinction, too, of which he was ambitious. . . . He was desirous of extending his reputation beyond his lifetime along the records of science.
“Often has he talked over such a project with me, and felt, I believe, fully convinced that his future chance of surgical renown might have been safely founded upon achievements in this clinic, which it was his desire to have fully recorded,” Pancoast said, referring to the surgical textbook Mütter did not live long enough to write. “Alas! There are many things, as we are apt to discover, to interpose between our wishes and their fulfillment.”
Pancoast spoke about the difficulties of the last few years of Mütter’s life, how much he suffered, how his attacks of hereditary gout and lung hemorrhages “greatly harassed, distressed, and weakened him” and “forced upon him by slow degrees, and to the great regret of his colleagues,” to resign his position and leave Philadelphia.
“The prospect of havi
ng to abandon his duties in this place, which had formed so large a part of the happiness of his existence, and was the theatre of so many triumphs,” Pancoast said, “he felt as an affliction which seemed to him, as he often expressed it, like the rending away of his right arm. . . .
“For myself especially, who lived so long in his gentle intimacy, his professional merits, great as they were, are not those which swim highest on the seas of thought. It is rather the sweetness of his character which I love most to recall; the kindness of his heart, which seldom allowed, even towards his enemies, an act of just retaliation to escape him, and I believe his colleagues, in musing over his name, will have their feelings mellowed by a similar sort of retrospection.”
Pancoast looked out at the audience. Some of the faces he found in it were people Mütter considered his closest friends and allies; others belonged to colleagues with whom he battled, in private and in public; but most—the new class of students who flooded into Jefferson Medical College that year—knew the man only by name, by reputation, by the legend he left behind. For them, he felt the most pity, to never have met this Mütter, to never have known such a man as he.
“Such, gentlemen, was the surgeon whom the science has lost,” he told them with a cracking voice. “Such the professor, full of kindness and knowledge, whom his classes have mourned. Such the friend and colleague, torn from us in the meridian of his existence, whose memory and name we shall ever cherish.”
• • •
There is no record of how Charles D. Meigs felt about the death of his longtime adversary. Meigs, at sixty-seven, was still a professor at Jefferson, and celebrating the release of the fourth edition of his textbook Females and Their Diseases, when news of Mütter’s death broke.
Meigs would turn in his letter of resignation to Jefferson Medical College the following year, having bought thirty-seven acres of land in Delaware County, eighteen miles from the city, where he hoped to spend his retirement. He had built a house on the top of the hill there, as well as a barn and a stable, a tenant house, a springhouse, an icehouse, and a workshop. He was creating an oasis for himself, where he could escape the life he had lived and the vulturous critics who were always trying to tear him down.
He called this new home Hammonasset, after “the Indian name of a small river in Connecticut [where] his forefathers had settled.” And looked forward to a time when all he had to do was read and write poetry, paint and eat and drink, and enjoy the company of his numerous children and grandchildren as they played in the fresh country air and the “luxuriant growth of noble woods” that covered over half the property.
“Men ought to retire from public appointments, whilst they were still somewhat fresh in health,” he told his son. “If they retained such positions to a late period of life, they sometimes lost the power of judging of their own fitness for duty.”
But Meigs’s resignation was not accepted. The war had begun, and no suitable replacement could be found. Meigs agreed to give one more course of lectures, which he accordingly did, “though against his will or wishes.”
“I am now old and well stricken in years,” Meigs angrily wrote in his diary, “and yet I labor diligently in my calling! How long!”
Finally, on February 25, 1861, six days after his sixty-ninth birthday, Charles D. Meigs gave his last lecture at Jefferson Medical College.
“This afternoon I delivered my last lecture at the Jefferson Medical College, and shall never more appear in public as a teacher . . . ,” he wrote in his diary. “I am surprised that this finale of my public life causes in me not the slightest excitement; I am simply glad to get out of it.”
After resigning, Meigs dropped out of public life nearly altogether, for he was “entirely weary of all medical responsibilities” and had “lost . . . taste for medical literature, and rarely looked into a medical book.” He was happy to disengage from the community he felt had turned against him and his beliefs, and leave behind this new world of medicine he increasingly found too confusing to understand.
But retirement for Meigs would not be the idyllic vision of which he had long dreamed. The Civil War, which some had predicted would be over within a matter of weeks, had been raging for months. Isolated in the country, Meigs made an agreement with the conductor of a train that passed his land daily. If any battle of disastrous end should be known to the city, the conductor would give two whistles with his engine, but for a successful contest, “he should whistle twice as often.”
Meigs had every reason to be interested in the war. His family was fighting in it—including his firstborn son, Montgomery C. Meigs, who was quartermaster general for the Union—and it wouldn’t be long before someone in his family would die in it.
John R. Meigs—firstborn son of Meigs’s own firstborn son, who was born the same year that Mütter and Meigs joined the Jefferson Medical College faculty—was Meigs’s “favorite and pride among all his descendants in the third generation. . . . High actions and noble exploits were looked for at the hands of this grandson.”
But Meigs’s dreams for his grandson—who had left his schooling at West Point, so eager was he to fight—were dashed when a bullet exploded inside the twenty-year-old soldier’s body as he was fighting “in one of the most luckless engagements of our war.” He was killed instantly.
The death of his favorite grandchild in such a brutal manner shook Meigs to his foundation, though it was said that his “mind rose faithful still, and strong, above the dreadful sorrow.” However, fate was not through with Meigs yet.
“The Angel of Death had not gone back to his abode among the spirits, but was fluttering about still,” another grandson would later write, “waiting only to come again and afflict yet more grievously the gray, vulnerable state of my grandfather.”
Just seven months after his beloved grandson’s death—just when “the keenness of [Meigs’s] grief had begun to lose his edge”—Meigs was devastated when Mary, his wife of just over fifty years, died as well. Her death broke him.
“She was not my grandfather’s better half; she was his whole earthly existence,” a grandson later wrote, “without whom he desired not to live. The world, that had long been embittered to him, became irksome to him now, and he would gladly have left it.”
But much to his own disappointment, death did not come for Meigs. His lungs, heart, and mind remained in good working order, even as the rest of his body—and his life—began to fall apart. Months passed as Meigs wandered about Hammonasset, alone, “slowly pining away in grief both of soul and body.” When he wasn’t mourning the loss of Mary, he began to suffer “untold distresses with a bodily infirmity that took away his peace.” He refused to let any doctor—even his friends—see him.
Meigs’s children finally demanded that their now elderly father return to the city, where he could be looked after more dutifully by the large family of children and grandchildren who were his only legacy now that his standing within the medical community had been irrevocably shattered. Meigs refused, but his family gave him no choice.
With that, Meigs left the house he had built for himself and his wife, and unhappily returned to Philadelphia, “whose hot red bricks and monotonous lanes he had long ago learned to hate,” haunted by the memories of his old patients, “the distressed women and dying children that he had known as [the city’s] inmates.”
“Cooped up in a second-story room, he pined for the peace and quietude of his pleasant home at Hammonasset,” one grandson recalled, “and each year he frightened his friends and neighbors by threatening to leave the ugly town, and find a little happiness in the fields alone.”
Meigs openly wished for death, telling his children and grandchildren that he would welcome it as a blessing—“a quiet night and an end of [my] toils.”
“There was only a little left of his mortal self; his flesh and bones were all out of joint,” according to a grandson, “and he pined for dissolution.”
But death still would not come to Meigs.
“All of him thought his life was now near its end,” a grandson wrote, “but the soul was laughing . . . proud of its own strength.”
It would take four long years “full of misery and rent with shame” before Meigs would finally die, alone in his sleep, at the age of seventy-seven.
• • •
Thomas Dent Mütter’s wife, Mary Alsop Mütter, was with her husband when he died, and rode with his body back to Connecticut, where her family took in the grieving widow and offered her a plot of land in the family cemetery in Middletown. Mary decided to build a small mausoleum to house her husband’s body.
The small, dark gray building would bear Mütter’s name—umlaut and all—in a sea of stones marked with Alsop. Mary made sure the mausoleum was built large enough to fit five tombs in it.
Thomas, her beloved husband, filled one. Mary’s tomb remained empty until her death eighteen years later, in 1877. She never remarried. The other three tombs would remain empty, built to honor the family she never knew. The names of Mütter’s father, mother, and baby brother were now etched in stone alongside Thomas’s and Mary’s, and in this way, Mütter’s family—who died apart from one another and whose bodies had been buried in distant and disparate cemeteries—could be joined together, finally and for all time.
But Mary’s mausoleum in Connecticut would not be the memorial to Mütter that would be most remembered.
• • •
In 1861, two years after Mütter’s untimely death, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia finally began construction on what would become the Mütter Museum. The three-story stone building, constructed on the corner of Thirteenth and Locust Streets, took two years to complete and was, per its namesake’s demand, fireproof.
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