The Knife ManBantam, 2005 - 482 pages When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, he reputedly based the house of the genial doctor turned fiend on the home of the 18th century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter combined an altruistic determination to advance scientific knowledge with dark dealings that brought him into daily contact with the sinister Georgian underworld. In 18th century London, Hunter was a man both acclaimed and feared. become the best-known anatomist of his day. At a time when operations were crude, painful and often fatal, Hunter revolutionized surgical practice through his groundbreaking scientific experiments. Rejecting Classical doctrines and medieval superstitions, he grounded surgery in experimental research and factual evidence. bodies, using the knowledge he gained to improve medical care for countless patients. Treating not only the poor but also some of the most illustrious characters of the time, such as Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron, he was appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to King George III and served in the Seven Years War where, following long, bloody battles, he patched up the unfortunate casualties' musket wounds and bayonet injuries. eminent naturalist; he dissected the first creatures brought back from Captain Cook's voyages to Australia and kept exotic animals in his country menagerie in Earls Court; his eventual thesis outlining his ideas on evolution included a passage headed, 'On the origin of species'. Written some 60 years before Darwin's famous paper, this potentially groundbreaking work was suppressed on religious grounds by the Royal Society. Ultimately, he created the largest anatomical collection of its kind - which has been called 'a museum of evolution' - still to be seen in central London. influential men of his age, including Sir Joseph Banks, Benjamin Franklin and James Watt, Hunter's tireless quest for human and animal bodies drove him to unparalleled extremes that immersed in the murky world of body-snatching. He paid large sums to his criminal contacts for the stolen corpses of men, women and children which were delivered in hampers to his back door. world characterized by hangings at the Tyburn Tree, by gruesome expeditions to dank churchyards, and by countless human dissections in attic rooms. Meticulously researched, vividly drawn, this is also a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer in the emergent sciences of geology, biology and evolution and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realm of superstition and into the dawn of modern medicine. |
Contents
The Coach Drivers Knee | 1 |
The Dead Mans Arm | 18 |
The Stout Mans Muscles | 43 |
Copyright | |
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Other editions - View all
The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery Wendy Moore Limited preview - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
anatomist aneurysm animal Anne army artery assistant autopsy Baillie Belle-Ile blood body-snatchers bones Boswell British Byrne Byrne's Catalogue century certainly Cheselden colleagues collection College of Surgeons corpses Covent Garden creatures dead death described died dissecting room Earls Court Edinburgh Edward Jenner eighteenth-century Everard Home experiments fellow George Georgian Glasgow gonorrhoea Helen Brock History of Medicine hospital human body Hunterian Museum Ibid injected James Jermyn Street Jessie Dobson John Abernethy John Hunter John's Johnson later Leicester Square letter living London Lord Loudoun Loudoun Memoirs Monro natural history never notes operation Ottley patients Percivall Pott performed physicians plainly Pott preparations published pupils RCS ms 49 recorded Roy Porter Royal College Royal Society skull Smollett Solander species specimens St George's Surgeons of England surgical syphilis teeth Thomas tooth treatise Tyburn venereal disease vessels William Clift William Hunter wound young