Isabelle Dinoire’s newly transplanted face, presented to the world this week, was a reminder of how one of medicine’s most miraculous and macabre arts can attract and repel in equal measure.
Publishers have played with the fascination with our insides for centuries, from the voyage-of-discovery accounts of Andreas Vesalius (On the Fabric of the Human Body, Norman Anatomy) and Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo on the Human Body, Dover) to more gratuitous works attached to the TV-anatomist Gunther von Hagens.
But for a “hands-in” look at pioneering surgery, Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery (Bantam) is a cut above. Many 17th-century peers dismissed him as rude and unethical, but Hunter’s work – on bees to buffalos – laid the foundations for today’s organ transplants.
The whole of Roy Porter’s Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine (Allen Lane) and its chapter on surgery in particular, provides a succinct and celebratory historical context. A mark of its skill is its popularity among patients – it reached Bill Clinton’s bedside table shortly after his heart bypass.
Arguably any surgeon who has picked up a scalpel is a pioneer to some extent: no two bodies are the same. So if extreme operations are your thing, look no further than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Penguin), the ultimate slice-and-stitch page-turner.
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