Digging Up the Dead

'When I was four or five years old my mother took me to see a dead man'. This riveting memory from the author's own life is the start of "Digging Up the Dead", a terrific historical narrative and an evocation of a whole world, where surgeons and body-snatchers colluded and conspired because this was the only way the surgeons could get anatomical experience. It tells the story of Astley Cooper 1768-1841, a tearaway young man from Norfolk who became a fiery radical (he took his pregnant wife to Paris during the Revolution) and a brilliantly successful surgeon. He was a student of the famous John Hunter, and the teacher of the poet John Keats, who was a medical student at Guy's; he became a fellow of the Royal Society and was the first person to describe the function of the middle ear, with its drum and bones. He became surgeon to three successive British Kings, as well as Princes and Prime Ministers. When Cooper died it was said that he had 'earned more than any surgeon or lawyer that ever lived', and his funeral drew huge crowds. The village where he had spent his last years was hung with black and a statue of him was placed in St Paul's. But Cooper's real passion was dissection.
He began with student raids on graveyards (and on neighbours' cats and dogs) and ended up running a country-wide network of informers and body snatchers, later boasting to a House of Commons enquiry that there was no man or woman in Britain whose body he could not obtain after their death. Druin Burch became fascinated by Cooper when he was working as a busy Accident and Emergency doctor, and he sets the past against his own reactions to autopsies and operations, hospitals and poetry. Beautifully written, brilliant and original, with a touch of the gothic, "Digging Up the Dead" suggests that biography too is a form of dissection, anatomizing and 'autopsy', which means 'to see for oneself'.