Chandak Sengoopta
Hero of the Hernia
Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon
By Druin Burch
Chatto & Windus 278pp £20 order from our bookshop
Surgery today may not always be safe, but it is no longer the bloody, insanitary and excruciating business it was two hundred years ago. Before the coming of anaesthesia and aseptic techniques, an operation often amounted to a death sentence on the patient. Complex internal operations were unimaginable in such unsanitary circumstances, and even the technically simpler forms of surgery could often be fatal because of shock and blood-loss. If the patient survived the operation, he was often killed by a post-operative infection.
In the eighteenth century surgery was anything but a learned profession – one could not even rely on a surgeon’s knowledge of human anatomy. Although all aspiring surgeons received some anatomical training, the teaching was superficial, and often hampered by a scarcity of cadavers for dissection. And learning on the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger