Listed on The Ultimate Buzzfeed Books Guide “for the person whose interests skew morbid” Listed in the New York Times' 10 New Books We Recommend This Week 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. She introduces us to Lister’s contemporaries―some of them brilliant, some outright criminal―and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers.Įerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world.

At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course of history.įitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister’s career path to his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. She conjures up early operating theaters―no place for the squeamish―and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and brute strength. In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 18. 'Warning: She spares no detail!' ―Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake

Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book PrizeĪ Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers WeeklyĪ Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing

The butchering art book