*THIS ITEM INCLUDES A BOOK PLATE SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR*
Winner, 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize
A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly
A Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian
"Warning: She spares no detail!" -Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake
In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking
world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by
advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She
conjures up early operating theaters–no place for the squeamish–and surgeons,
who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and brute strength.
These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than
patients' afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that
kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn't have been
more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker
surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course
of history.
Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister's career path to his audacious
claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a
sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to Lister's
contemporaries–some of them brilliant, some outright criminal–and leads us
through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art,
the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for
cadavers.
Eerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a
visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into
the modern world.
Lindsey Fitzharris has a PhD in the history of science and medicine from the
University of Oxford. She is the creator of the popular website The
Chirurgeon's Apprentice, and is the writer and presenter of the Yo…
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