Digging Up the Dead
Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon
Published on 6. March 2008
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-1-84595-013-2 (ISBN)
Description
A tearaway young man from Norfolk, Astley Cooper (1768-1841) became the world's richest and most famous surgeon. Admired from afar by the Brontes and up close by his student Keats, his success was born of an appetite for bloody revolutions.
He set up an international network of bodysnatchers, won the Royal Society's highest prize and boasted to Parliament that there was no one whose body he could not steal. Experimenting on his neighbours' corpses and the living bodies of their stolen pets, his discoveries were as great as his infamy.
Caught up in the French Revolution, and in attempts to bring radical democracy to Britain, Cooper nevertheless rose to become surgeon to royals from the Prince Regent to Queen Victoria. Setting the past against his own reactions to autopsies and operations, hospitals and poetry, Burch's Digging Up the Dead is a riveting account of a world of gothic horror as well as fertile idealism.
He set up an international network of bodysnatchers, won the Royal Society's highest prize and boasted to Parliament that there was no one whose body he could not steal. Experimenting on his neighbours' corpses and the living bodies of their stolen pets, his discoveries were as great as his infamy.
Caught up in the French Revolution, and in attempts to bring radical democracy to Britain, Cooper nevertheless rose to become surgeon to royals from the Prince Regent to Queen Victoria. Setting the past against his own reactions to autopsies and operations, hospitals and poetry, Burch's Digging Up the Dead is a riveting account of a world of gothic horror as well as fertile idealism.
Reviews / Votes
Druin Burch has written a detailed and deeply felt biography of this colourful figure... Digging Up the Dead is not simply the biography of a great surgeon, but a brilliant portrait of surgical life before the coming of anaesthesia, anitisepsis, antibiotics, and professional regulations * Literary Review * A physician himself, Burch brings a special insight into episodes whose significance would doubtless be lost or bungled in the hands of another writer... His detailed analyses of early nineteenth-century medical procedures for treating complicated conditions...are masterful, deft and humane * Times Literary Supplement * Vivid account of 18th-century surgeon Astley Cooper's life... Burch, also a doctor, mixes his narrative with recollections from his own practice, which serve to enhance this lively biography...All in all a jolly good read * BBC History Magazine * An ambitious and convincing attempt to bring back to life the man who was responsible for so many less respectable acts of resurrection * New Statesman * [An] evocative biography... Burch (clearly smitten) dares the reader to empathise with "this vain, egotistical, nepotistic and rather wonderful" man, with considerable success * The Lancet * Besides being disgustingly entertaining ... these shocking stories are valuable history. As a doctor himself, Burch evokes the tensions between brutality and beautiful science by informing the historical narrative with his own memoirs * New Scientist *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
367 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84595-013-2 (9781845950132)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
10/2010
1st Edition
Vintage Digital
€12.99
Available for download
Person
Druin Burch works as a hospital doctor in Oxford, and is the author of Taking the Medicine.