The Knife Man

The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery Paperback – September 12, 2006

Author: Wendy Moore | Language: English | ISBN: 0767916530 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery – September 12, 2006
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• Paperback: 354 pages
• Publisher: Broadway Books; 1 Reprint edition (September 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767916530
• ISBN-13: 978-0767916530
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #50,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #54 in Books > Medical Books > History

We take so much of our medical care for granted these days, and forget that we have only actually had such choices for lives without pain or crippling illnesses within the last 150 years. In other medical history books, most of them deal with the changes in public health, the use of microscopy to find bacteria and later viruses, the slow and serendipitous findings of antibiotics. This was the first book I've come across that dealt with surgery. It caught my eye because I had read about the use of 'body snatchers', men who either dug up freshly buried bodies or would never bury them in the first place, and sell them to physicians and others who were trying to understand more about the human body. This particular 'horror' was one of the first major bioethical problems, as universities needed to train physicians, but experimenting on human beings was forbidden (and rightfully so), but at the same time, they needed to have someway of understanding how the human body works. Many men before Hunter used animals in experimentation, and even that was frowned upon, but to those like Hunter and Leonardo da Vinci, there was no way to elucidate how to help people when their bodies were so different from those of other animals. Until the late 1700's physicians were still relying on archaic medical practices that had no basis in reality, and much of what was done to patients just made things worse (such as the use of bleeding to purge the body of humours).

Hunter obviously was an immensely intelligent man who used 'resurrection men' to get him the bodies he needed not only to teach himself the best way to operate on things like aneurysms, but also to teach anatomy to his students.

Wendy Moore's history of John Hunter, the almost cult figure who was, quite simply, a full advocate of the scientific method and thus not only the grandfather of modern surgical techniques but also an early proponent of evolution, almost a hundred years before Darwin, is a fascinating and enlightening read.

I picked up this book because I have an almost obsessive fixation with the ways of ancient medicine--bloodletting and such. Moore's book fully explores the techniques of the time that John Hunter worked against, not so much out of pure rebelliousness but through a simple desire to provide his patients the best care he could manage and take the time to study the human body and related organisms to find how anatomy worked. The methodology of the 18th century was almost empericial in nature--doctors studied their patients from afar and usually prescribed treatment to barbers, who did all the nasty work. In fact, doctors weren't even expected to know anatomy and sometimes followed texts written by ancient Greeks when it came to medical knowledge. Moore is fair not to paint EVERY practitioner that way (for others, like John Hunter's own brother William seemed to have a vested interest in exploring the mysteries of the human body), for John Hunter did not have to work totally alone and in the dark, but this book details well the lengths John Hunter went through to learn about human anatomy and how nature works--endless hours of study dissecting human and animal subjects to form himself a menagerie of preserved anatomies and thorough documentation of his findings, which kept him busy almost seventeen hours a day easily.

And, Moore of course details the lengths John Hunter went through to get his case studies.

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