The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery [Kindle Edition]
Author: Wendy Moore | Language: English | ISBN: B0012RMV9S | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery
You can download The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he based the house of the genial doctor-turned-fiend on the home of John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter was both widely acclaimed and greatly feared.
From humble origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the eighteenth century. In an age when operations were crude, extremely painful, and often fatal, he rejected medieval traditions to forge a revolution in surgery founded on pioneering scientific experiments. Using the knowledge he gained from countless human dissections, Hunter worked to improve medical care for both the poorest and the best-known figures of the era—including Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron.
An insatiable student of all life-forms, Hunter was also an expert naturalist. He kept exotic creatures in his country menagerie and dissected the first animals brought back by Captain Cook from Australia. Ultimately his research led him to expound highly controversial views on the age of the earth, as well as equally heretical beliefs on the origins of life more than sixty years before Darwin published his famous theory.
Although a central figure of the Enlightenment, Hunter’s tireless quest for human corpses immersed him deep in the sinister world of body snatching. He paid exorbitant sums for stolen cadavers and even plotted successfully to steal the body of Charles Byrne, famous in his day as the “Irish giant.”
In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter’s murky and macabre world—a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine. Books with free ebook downloads available The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery
You can download The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he based the house of the genial doctor-turned-fiend on the home of John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter was both widely acclaimed and greatly feared.
From humble origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the eighteenth century. In an age when operations were crude, extremely painful, and often fatal, he rejected medieval traditions to forge a revolution in surgery founded on pioneering scientific experiments. Using the knowledge he gained from countless human dissections, Hunter worked to improve medical care for both the poorest and the best-known figures of the era—including Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron.
An insatiable student of all life-forms, Hunter was also an expert naturalist. He kept exotic creatures in his country menagerie and dissected the first animals brought back by Captain Cook from Australia. Ultimately his research led him to expound highly controversial views on the age of the earth, as well as equally heretical beliefs on the origins of life more than sixty years before Darwin published his famous theory.
Although a central figure of the Enlightenment, Hunter’s tireless quest for human corpses immersed him deep in the sinister world of body snatching. He paid exorbitant sums for stolen cadavers and even plotted successfully to steal the body of Charles Byrne, famous in his day as the “Irish giant.”
In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter’s murky and macabre world—a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine. Books with free ebook downloads available The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery
- File Size: 995 KB
- Print Length: 352 pages
- Publisher: Broadway Books; 1 edition (December 18, 2007)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0012RMV9S
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #129,383 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #40 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Special Topics > History
It is hard to understand that the genius John Hunter, one of the star figures of the Enlightenment, should not be one of those scientists whom everyone has heard of. If the name does not ring a bell, it is strongly recommended that you pick up _The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery_ (Broadway Books) by Wendy Moore. Not just a genius in surgical technique and innovator of scientific experiment to guide surgical choices, he was a brilliant anatomist of other species as well, he was an attentive teacher, and he set up a museum that demonstrated the now accepted views of the origins of life and the age of the Earth. He was constantly attentive to animal behavior and physiology and his curiosity never stopped. A mainstay to his friends, he was also willful and irascible, and made enemies easily, one of the reasons he got limited credit during his lifetime for his new ways of thinking. Moore's book is an exhilarating view of a foolhardy, energetic, innovative, and brilliant man.
John Hunter was born in 1728 in Scotland. He left school at thirteen, and left Oxford after just two months. He instead followed his older brother William to London to help in William's anatomy school in Covent Garden. He would dissect thousands of bodies, and was well acquainted with the "resurrection men", the grave robbers who provided fresh, or maybe not so fresh, specimens. Hunter's reliance on observation and experiment put him squarely against the medical establishment, which had insisted on relying on Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen, "preferring to bleed, blister, and purge their patients to early graves.
The Knife Man is an absolutely compelling read and is a superb blend of history, science, and philosophy. John Hunter was kind of like the Richard Feinman of the medical establishment of the 18th century. He pursued his own research, never buckled to peer pressure, and had absolute faith in his beliefs. At the same time, he was methodical, open-minded, and humble enough to realize that man bowed to Nature, not vice versa as many of his contemporaries would have wished.
We have John Hunter to thank for bringing medicine, quite literally, out of the dark ages and into the scientific age. Prior to Hunter's arrival, doctors believed that most ill derived from imbalances in "humors." By bloodletting, drinking your own urine, etc, etc, one could have a hope of regaining health. Frankly, as Hunter quickly learned, this was complete and utter hogwash and he systematically set out to prove that many of that age's theories were plainly wrong.
Hunter succeeded in not only altering the understanding of medicine and anatomy in his time but also in inculcating a true scientific approach in his teaching role that reaches to today. He literally taught over a thousand doctors, including those who would go on to found the University of Pennsylvania's hospital in the capital of the American colony in Philadelphia. These doctors spread around the world in a wave and ultimately brought down the ridiculous knowledge base founded by Galen thousands of years before and replaced it with a rigorous, scientific one.
You don't need to be a doctor to understand this book but it helps to have a little medical knowledge, anyone who has taken biology at high school level will be fine.
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