Thomas Dent Mutter

Thomas Dent Mütter (March 9, 1811 - March 19, 1859) was an American surgeon.[1] Born in Richmond, Virginia, Mütter was orphaned at the age of 8 and raised by a distant relative.[2] He attended Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia starting in 1824.[3] Mutter graduated with an MD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1831 and eventually took a position as an assistant to Dr. Thomas Harris at the Medical Institute of Jefferson College.[4] At the age of 30, he became the Chair of Surgery at the Jefferson Medical College and held this position from 1841-1856. He operated on hundreds of patients to repair deformities and became the first surgeon in 1846 to administer ether anesthesia in Philadelphia.[2] He is best known for the “Mutter Flap” which he used in order to treat burn victims and was an early way to graft that is still used today.[5][6]

The Mutter Museum opened in 1863 in Philadelphia[7] and has a collection of more than 25,000 specimens that Mutter collected.[7] It includes a vertebra of John Wilkes Booth, a piece of Albert Einstein’s brain,[8] a cancerous growth from the mouth of President Grover Cleveland and the livers and plaster cast of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng.[7][1]