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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 609
EAN num: 9780767916530
ISBN number: 0767916530
Label: Broadway
Manufacturer: Broadway
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: September 12, 2006
Publishing house: Broadway
Release Date: September 12, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 15802
Studio: Broadway
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In an era when bloodletting was considered a cure for everything from colds to smallpox, surgeon John Hunter was a medical innovator, an eccentric, and the person to whom anyone who has ever had surgery probably owes his or her life. In this sensational and macabre story, we meet the surgeon who counted not only luminaries Benjamin Franklin, Lord Byron, Adam Smith, and Thomas Gainsborough among his patients but also “resurrection men” among his close acquaintances. A captivating portrait of his ruthless devotion to uncovering the secrets of the human body, and the extraordinary lengths to which he went to do so—including body snatching, performing pioneering medical experiments, and infecting himself with venereal disease—this rich historical narrative at last acknowledges this fascinating man and the debt we owe him today.
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Rated by buyers 
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The surgeons of the 18th century faced a dilemma that would tie any of today's bioethicists into a pretzel shape.
They had inherited a crude, limited, unsystematic and usually ineffective technique from medieval or even classical times, but to get to today's comprehensive, delicate and scientific methods they had to experiment on the living and the dead.
The question of experimenting on the living presents obvious difficulties, but in some ways experimenting on the dead was an even more problematic question 250 years ago. Many people held a religious belief that a corpse disassembled on Earth could never be reunited in heaven after the Second Coming. There was also a deep horror of autopsy itself.
Few if any of the surgeons of the day or their admirers spent time worrying about this, and certainly not the greatest body investigator, John Hunter, subject of Wendy Moore's "The Knife Man."
Many writers have commented on the brutality of 18th century London, but none that I know of presents it in such a chilling way. Not only the descriptions of surgeries done without anesthetic (other than alcohol or opium) and without concern for either asepsis or antisepsis, and not only the lack of social fastidiousness that allowed both surgeries and autopsies on stinking corpses to be done in private homes.
There was also the social brutality of the grave robbing and corpse stealing. At public hangings, there were brawls that lasted for hours between families of the condemned and surgeons' "recruiters" for possession of the bodies of the hanged. Most different from our own conceptions was the indifference toward crime and brutality on the part of the leading lights of this age of the most particular personal fastidious (in behavior if not personal hygiene) among the upper crust. Both the logic-chopper David Hume and the moralizing historian Edward Gibbon, whose favorite word was "specious," attended a full course of anatomy lessons on stolen corpses, and Moore observes that Gibbon, the cultivated gentleman, courteously thanked the surgeon following every session.
Into this brawling maelstrom of medieval savagery and only slightly less savage Enlightenment wandered a possibly dyslexic Scottish farm boy, John Hunter. Never have a man and a place been better suited to each other.
Hunter had an astonishingly deft touch with a scalpel, which would not have meant much to us except that he also had a fearless, keen brain coupled with a fanatic desire to learn what life was. There were other, bigger cities (like Istanbul), but if Hunter had ended up there, we still would not have heard of him. London was in his time (1728-1793) the world's emporium, and he cut up not only stolen people but whales, dormice, lizards and lions. Anything could be had through money or influence.
Moore's biography is an odd combination of popular biography and scientific monograph (with over 40 pages of endnotes). It can be read for information about the origins of surgery, evolution, physiology and medical care; or as a real-life novel with unbelievable plot turns that would shame the scriptwriter of an opera , soap or grand.
Hunter was consulted about the infant Byron's twisted foot and Hume's cancer; his wife was rather too friendly with Joseph Haydn; he discovered the separate circulation of the blood in mother and fetus; he helped found the very first medical and very first veterinary schools in England, he . . . well, you will have to read Moore's book, the list is almost endless.
Hunter introduced a rigorous, scientific method into biological investigation -- ironically, in opposition to his older brother, William, who was also a famous anatomist but stuck in medieval ways -- and he made numerous discoveries. Some were correct (bees make wax) and some were incorrect (syphilis and gonorrhea were the same disease).
Famed among the medical community, Hunter is probably best known generally for his relentless pursuit of the pitiful Irish giant, Charles Byrne. Byrne had such a horror of being "anatomized" that he asked his friends to put his body in a lead coffin and sink it in the English Channel. Hunter got it anyway, and Byrne's bones can still be seen in Hunter's museum, even though half the collection was burned by Nazi bombs in 1941.
Hunter's bones are in Westminster Abbey.
This book badly needs illustrations of Hunter's "beautiful" natural history preparations, but it does not have them.
Rated by buyers -
Not a quick, easy read, but an interesting and intriguing read to see how far all medicine, especially surgery, has come. The story begins and is largely finished even before handwashing was known to be a preventative of disease and infection. The reader is left to wonder how far medicine and surgery will progress in the subsequent 300 years and how doctors,surgeons and readers of that day will look back on what we consider "state of the art" medicine today.
(When discussing this book at recent book club meeting, one of our members, a physican, said he believed people will ultimately look at what we are doing with chemotherapy and radiation in the treatment of cancer to be the equivalent of bleeding and humors in John Hunter's day...an interesting thought.)
This is a book a that will stay with you and come to mind weeks and months after the reading is done. Fascinating read. Most fascinating. At times amazing and mesmerizing.
Rated by buyers 
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John Hunter was a blunt, irascible sort who was not disposed to accept established opinions on health and the functionings of the human body. Living in London during the 18th century, he quickly developed a reputation as an iconoclast who rejected tradition and sought to learn as much as he could about human anatomy. This necessitated a strong stomach and a willingness to flout the law. Since dissecting a human body was against the law, Hunter and others who wished to do so had to be willing to deal with unsavory body snatchers who haunted cemeteries and execution sites.
This fascinating biography is divided into chapters with headings similar to those found in hard boiled detective stories. Each describes one of Hunter's famous human or animal dissections and traces the expansion of knowledge that resulted. The descriptions are colorful and vivid and do an excellent job of depicting the full sight, sound, and smell of London in the 1700s. The stories of Hunter's dissections and his surgeries, many surprisingly complex and invasive despite the lack of anesthesia and antiseptics, fill the reader with awe and admiration.
Rated by buyers -
Funny how I'd always confused John Hunter with his brother William whose reputation as a prig more concerned with titles and position than with surgery filtered down to me through histories of science and the times that I'd read. And of course I'd come across the Hunter name in connection with lurid tales of body snatching and the gut-dabbling "Jack Tearguts" of Blake's "An Island In The Moon," which gives us the verbal equivalent of a Gillray print. Now Wendy Moore has brought clarity to this subject, and I now see that John Hunter was indeed on the cutting edge (forgive the pun!) of his profession! Moore takes us through the streets of Johnsonian London, complete with pavements slick with chamber pot slops, poor children willing to sell healthy teeth and mangle their smiles forever so that the smiles of the elite could be temporarily refurbished for tremendous sums, and every kind of illness ready to hurry man, woman and child to an early end and task their brief existences with gleets, tumors, stones, tremors, rots and imposthumes before they expired. Through it all stalked keen-witted John ("Jack") Hunter, skilled in teasing apart the threads and fibers of nerves and separating the anatomical processes for preparations that are still pointed to for the genius they display, and unafraid to spend long hours in the presence of the dead when the Ghost of Cock Lane made headlines in the daily papers. Like William Blake, Hunter was a plain speaker, totally sure of his abilities, and this of course brought him enemies by the dozens from among the tribe of doctors and surgeons who relied on reading "the Ancient Classics" on medicine and an old boy system to put them in positions of power. Hunter, on the other hand, was almost alone in his insistence on learning from close observation and trial and error. In an age when surgery was done with dirty fingernails and aprons stiff with dried blood, this system perhaps did not bring much visible change to the sad lives of those stricken by ill health, but it was the key to the invention of new techniques and the arrival of our modern understanding of the human body. But this is not all; Moore also shows us that this wide-ranging intellect was intent on understanding the well-springs of life and the "living principle" itself and fashioned an early form of evolutionary theory which he taught to his students. However, there is indeed an unsavory, and even a sinister side to this story. Hunter grows obsessed with obtaining the bones of a young Irish Giant, and he does so against the poor man's death bed wishes. The literary salon that Hunter's beautiful wife sponsors once a week takes place while Hunter and his crew of helpers and students unload bodies delivered by the resurrectionists to the basement door. We can only imagine the occasional smell of decay wafting up the stairs while Horace Walpole holds forth in powdered wig on the superiority of English literature. The surgeon grows more and more eccentric, because perhaps his mid-life experiment involving syphilitic self-innoculation was having unexpected ramifications. Moore also tells us about Hunter's menagerie and his practice of wide-awake, bug-eyed, howling vivisection-unto-death, which would horrify animal rights activists today. Still and all, the Jack Hunter of Wendy Moore's book is a real hero.
Though the writing in The Knife Man can sometimes be redundant, the style is good and the content compelling, if at times, a little grim. I recommend this book highly.
Rated by buyers 
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I found the book immediately tedious and repetitive, a seemingly endless series of similar case histories of operations by the great John Hunter, in squalid conditions as he was reviled and admired. The book needed much stronger editing. The prose reminds me a little of articles in Readers Digest. There doesn't seem to be much drama or unpredictability here, the whole book's course is immediately plain. I guess if you like to know how modern operations originated this is the book for you, but it lacked something like vitality and sophistication to keep my interest. A real disappointment.
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