Round-Up: Exclusive Excerpt from DR. MÜTTER’S MARVELS, Halloween Apparel, PERNICIOUS Q&A, SOME KIND OF HATE Soundtrack

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Some Kind of Hate: The soundtrack by Robert Allaire is now available on CD Baby and is expected to be available on iTunes soon.

"Some Kind of Hate Soundtrack:

1. Rage Within 2:50

2. Cutter 3:36

3. Mind's Eye 2:12

4. Moira 3:05

5. I Did It for You 3:55

6. A Moment, Still 1:38

7. Wolves from the Door 2:11

8. Take Back What's Yours 1:01

9. Wish Them Dead 2:20

10. A Wish Granted 2:31

11. This Is What You Wanted 2:01

12. Payback 4:19

13. Undo 1:42

14. Earth, Dirt 0:58

15. There's Always One 1:47

16. Now You Know How It Feels 2:33

17. Innocents Bleed the Same 1:43

18. Together 1:19

19. Immolation 1:37"

For more information, visit: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/robertallaire2

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Dr. Mütter's Marvels: "Imagine a time in medicine where a doctor who simply washed his hands and tools before a procedure was considered “finicking and affected”. Imagine a place where if an ill woman refused her doctor’s treatment of applying leeches to her uterus, it would be perfectly acceptable for him to scream, “Well, then, madam, I suppose you will die!” Imagine an era where all operations, no matter how brutal or invasive, were performed on patients who were wide-awake and screaming, and who sometimes even attacked their doctors—often with the surgeon’s own instruments.

This was the world that Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter was born into, and the one which he was destined to change.

In the bestselling book DR. MÜTTER’S MARVELS: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine (Gotham Books, September 8, 2015, Paperback), Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz explores the previously untold life story of the man with the famous name: a young, handsome and ambitiously brilliant surgeon whose talents in the operating room and lectures halls were unrivaled in his lifetime. The deluxe eBook edition of DR. MÜTTER’S MARVELS includes over one hour of audio in which author Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz shares facts, stories and insights about Dr. Mütter and his contemporaries that she discovered in her research but didn’t make it into the printed book.

Through Mütter’s humanist eyes, we are given a front row seat to the evolution of American medicine: from bleedings and leechings to the standardization of medical schools; from the discovery of anesthesia to his community’s frustrating resistance to washing hands and sterilizing tools; from the unimaginable medical cases provoked from the rise of industrialism, to the challenges and innovations birthed as the country marched toward the Civil War.

Although he only lived for 47 years, Mütter’s impact within medicine is still felt, and his legacy lives on with his enormously popular namesake museum. And now, with DR. MÜTTER’S MARVELS, his strange, inspiring and untold story can finally be shared."

To learn more, visit:

• http://www.penguin.com/book/dr-mutters-marvels-by-cristin-okeefe-aptowicz/9781592409259

The Women Who Were Swallowed By Fire

Excerpt One

Many of the women who came to Mütter were monsters.

That is how they were seen on the streets, how strangers would describe them, and how they saw themselves when they were confronted with the horror of their own reflections.

In the nineteenth century, women were largely dependent on men. While there were always exceptions to this rule, for the most part, to have a roof over her head, food in her stomach, or a life worth living, a woman needed a man to provide it—in one way or another. And for a woman to find a husband and leave her father’s house, it was said she needed to be beautiful and pure, modest and obedient.

So what could the future hold for a woman who the world saw as a monster?

To understand how these “monsters” were created, it is important to understand how women were forced to dress at this time: an imposed modesty that could literally kill them. Every morning, women began the process of dressing themselves for the day in the era’s notoriously restrictive clothing. Layer upon layers of cotton, wool, and silk, and these pieces of clothing held snugly to the body with tightly bound ribbons and laces. When this routine was finally complete, her movement was, of course, severely limited.

The way women walked, moved, or even stood up in the 1800s was dictated in part by these restrictive layers of clothing. And yet, household chores—cooking, cleaning, minding children—were expected to be performed while wearing these restraining frocks.

Now imagine the typical nineteenth-century kitchen, where cooking was often still done over an open flame. Pans were placed on grates, and pots hung from swinging arms that could be pulled out of and pushed into the fire.
It is in this horrible concurrence of troubles—a veritable death trap of early domesticity—that these monsters were born.

How easily it could happen—a piece of hot ember loosens itself from its pack and rolls to the floor, its orange flame licking the fine lace of a petticoat; or a splatter of hot oil hops from a swinging pot and leaps—flame-touched—onto a woolen apron; or even something as basic as a child running toward his mother to hug her legs and accidentally pushing her into the flames. Once started, these types of fires were devastatingly difficult to stop.

Within moments, more of the women’s clothing would begin to catch fire, layer after layer, building intensity. Restricted in her movements and impeded by that easy flammability of the natural fibers, she would helplessly flail, trying to reach the flame and beat it out.

However, the air would only serve to fan the flames, making them grow larger, stronger, more powerful. And in her bending over, the fire would often hit the neck of the dress, a virtual powder keg in its combination of air, restrictive dense fabrics, and light airy layers of decorative cloth.

And this is where the real damage was done. The woman’s face would soon be consumed with flame—burning, blistering, turning skin to liquid, and tearing flesh from bone. It was said the lucky ones died. The ones who did survive were cursed to live half a life, as monsters.

Of course, Mütter knew of these women. Survivors of such horrible burns often sought the help of plastic surgeons, hoping there was something that could be done. Those who had been burned as children had never known a normal life.

Very little could be done. Typically, years would have passed, and the scar tissue grew painfully tight around the women’s faces. Some of the skin was thick and tough; other parts were stretched impossibly thin. The landscape covered by the disfigurement was often large: Horrific scarring commonly reached from the woman’s chest up to her eyes. Because of the alarming aftermath of their gruesome burns, these women—hidden from society by their shame-filled families—frequently couldn’t close their mouths, blink their eyes, or turn their heads.

The older they got, the more they realized their already small world was only going to shrink: Who would take care of them once their siblings left the family home to start their own lives, and their parents grew old and thin from age and failing health?

Too often, death by their own hands seemed their only solution. And by the time they grew desperate enough to find their way into Mütter’s office, they would tell him that is exactly what they would be prepared to do if he did not help them.

The most obvious solution—to cut away the damaged skin and replace it with healthy skin from another person or even another area of the victim’s own body—was assumed to be impossible. In fact, experiments in this area had halted progress in plastic surgery for centuries.

“It is not generally admitted but ‘plastic surgery’ originated in India,” Mütter would tell his class. Earlier in the millennium, Indian criminals earned “peculiar punishments” for their crimes—noses sliced off, ears, lips, limbs. The natural result of this practice was the creation of a black market for doctors who claimed to be able to replace missing body parts.

“And what the knife of the executioner called forth in India,” Mütter would tell them, “disease and accident have excited in Europe and America.”

Mütter continued his far-reaching investigation of the genesis of plastic surgery, telling the story of Gaspar Taliacotius of Bologna, whose fame depended on his having practiced the art of restoring lost parts of the body by grafting and who tried but ultimately abandoned attempts to make noses from the skins of other people.

Mütter told how Taliacotius attempted to transplant the skin from the arm of a porter onto the noseless face of his patient.

“All went well for the space of thirteen months,” he explained, “but at the end of that period the borrowed organ gradually lost its temperature, and in a few days became gangrenous; upon inquiring, it was found that at the self-same period the original owner of the nose had died!”

The students would laugh at this obvious tall tale, but Mütter continued.

“The sympathy between the nose and its parent was indeed most extraordinary,” Mütter told them. “Not only did the former die with the latter but during life it was effected by the pains of the original proprietor.” He then told them another artful story about “three Spaniards, whose noses were all cut from [the skin of] the same porter” and who were shocked to discover their noses swelling enormously in size. In an effort to get to the source of the problem, the Spaniards tried to locate the porter, only to hear that he was bruised and swollen himself, and recovering in bed after being severely kicked by a horse. The Spaniards, in retaliation, went and kicked the horse!

The students would again laugh, as Mütter smiled and rolled his eyes. But his expression turned stern when he brought home his point: As preposterous as these stories were, the chief consequence of this ridicule was that there was “no attempt to perform these operations made after this period until the latter end of the last century.”

The fear of being seen as foolish had prevented progress; “an art nearly lost, yet of the greatest value to mankind” was a grim consequence indeed.

“Even now plastic surgery must be considered in its infancy, for although much has been done, much remains to do, in order that the true value of the principle may be fully established,” he told his students.

And Mütter was now attempting to put into action what he had been teaching his students: He was going to move the science and art of plastic surgery forward.