Orphaned at the age of 8 and raised by a distant relative,[2] he attended Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia (1824)[3][4] and graduated with an MD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1831.

[5] At the age of 30, he became the Chair of Surgery at the Jefferson Medical College and held this position from 1841 to 1856, when he resigned because of gout and lung disease.

John's business and health declined and he eventually left for Europe, leaving Thomas with his maternal grandmother, Frances Gillies.

However, during his early studies in college, he began to have attacks of intermittent fever and also developed biliary colic, a chronic condition.

In 1835, Thomas Harris invited Mütter to be an Assistant teacher of surgery at the Philadelphia Institute at a summer school of medicine.

Mütter's collected syllabi were published in 1850, six years before his retirement since he developed chronic gout and tuberculosis-related pulmonary hemorrhages.

For those patients, death was a risk they happily took in the surgical room for the chance to bring some level of peace and normality to their mangled faces or agonized bodies.

[11] Today, it includes a vertebra of John Wilkes Booth, a piece of Albert Einstein's brain,[12] a cancerous growth from the mouth of President Grover Cleveland and the livers and plaster cast of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng.