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.
