The Knife Man by Wendy Moore
The vivid, often gruesome portrait of the 18th-century pioneering surgeon and father of modern medicine, John Hunter. When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he based the house of the genial doctor-turned-fiend on the home of John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter was both widely acclaimed and greatly feared. From humble origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the eighteenth century. In an age when operations were crude, extremely painful, and often fatal, he rejected medieval traditions to forge a revolution in surgery founded on pioneering scientific experiments. Using the knowledge he gained from countless human dissections, Hunter worked to improve medical care for both the poorest and the best-known figures of the era--including Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron. An insatiable student of all life-forms, Hunter was also an expert naturalist. He kept exotic creatures in his country menagerie and dissected the first animals brought back by Captain Cook from Australia. Ultimately his research led him to expound highly controversial views on the age of the earth, as well as equally heretical beliefs on the origins of life more than sixty years before Darwin published his famous theory. Although a central figure of the Enlightenment, Hunter's tireless quest for human corpses immersed him deep in the sinister world of body snatching. He paid exorbitant sums for stolen cadavers and even plotted successfully to steal the body of Charles Byrne, famous in his day as the Irish giant. In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter's murky and macabre world--a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine.Wendy Moore is a journalist and a writer. She has spent more than two decades specializing in health and medical themes after working as a reporter for local newspapers. Her work as a freelance journalist has appeared in a variety of newspapers and periodicals, including the Guardian, the Observer, and the British Medical Journal, and she has received numerous accolades. She earned the Diploma in the History of Medicine from the Society of Apothecaries (DHMSA) in 1999 after writing significantly on medical history and winning the Maccabaean Award for the best dissertation that year. This is her debut novel.
The Knife Man was selected Consumer Book of the Year by the Medical Journalists' Association when it was first published in the United Kingdom. Moore has two children, Sam and Susannah, and lives in South London with her partner, Peter, who is also a journalist.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780767916530 |
| ISBN 10 | 0767916530 |
| Title | The Knife Man |
| Author | Wendy Moore |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 2006-09-12 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |