Wendy Moore - The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery

Table of Contents

For Peter, Sam, and Susie

Praise for THE KNIFE MAN

The Knife Man is a fascinating portrait of a man of magnificent curiosity and fearless inquiry. Filled to the brim with marvelous and sometimes gruesome details, Wendy Moores book introduces us to a maverick intellect who recognized that the understanding of disease had to be rooted in a knowledge of the structure and functions of the body in healthan approach that lives on in the best of medicine today more than two centuries later. His legacy lives on not only in his discoverieswhich were manybut in the generation of doctors he trained to pursue medicine with the same passion and desire to understand that propelled his own life in science and medicine.

Lisa Sanders, MD, author of The New York Times Magazines Diagnosis column

A fascinating, if at times stomach-turning, biography of a maverick to whom many people have owed their lives.

Science News

This is a deftly written and informative tale that will please readers of science history, period buffs and everyone in between.

Publishers Weekly

Moores telling of [Hunters] story is detailed and often grisly but engrossing throughout.

Booklist

Moores lurid biography of John Hunter, the famous surgeon and anatomist of eighteenth-century London, is a story almost too fantastical to believe. It is complete with grave snatchers, clandestine experiments, exotic animals, even protohuman transplants. Moore brings London and John Hunters life into vivid focus. Her book is a compelling read.

Mickey Eisenberg, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine, University of Washington

Wendy Moore has done justice to this marvelous man in a biography packed with gruesome facts and eye-opening perceptions. It is an accomplishment and a splendid read. If ever you wondered why surgeons are so full of themselves, this account of the founder of their profession might provide some clues.

The Times of London

Moore has written a fast-moving, vivid life which is not for the faint-hearted.... Wendy Moore has a remarkable tale to tell, and she tells it with vim and gusto.

The Spectator

John Hunter is not a well-known name outside specialist circles, although that scandalous situation should be corrected by Wendy Moores marvelous biography. Virtually every page of her biography bears witness to her knowledge, percipience and devotion to the task.

The Times Higher Education Supplement (UK)

Definitely not for the squeamish, Moores visceral portrait of this complex and brilliant man offers a wonderful insight into sickness, suffering, and surgery in the eighteenth century.

The Guardian (UK)

Moore has helped to pay the debt we all owe to this short-tempered dyslexic healer.

Telegraph

The Knife Man is a fascinating, well-researched dip into medical history but stay away from it until well after lunch: Parts of it (the description of an aneurysm removal, for example) are not for the faint-hearted.

The Sunday Express

Wendy Moores romp through Hunters extraordinary life as The Knife Man should send you rushing to the revamped Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England to see Hunters collection.

New Scientist

Wendy Moore is to be congratulated on this latest account of the life and times of John Hunter. She has produced an easy to read account of the life of the remarkable man which, although presumably designed with a lay audience in mind, will be read with pleasure by professionals.

British Medical Journal

A fine piece of work and I found it hard to believe that it is the authors first book. It is carefully researched, engagingly written, and generously illustrated.... Shes a biographer to be watched. She and her publishers are to be congratulated.

Scottish Sunday Herald

An absolute intellectual delight, even if, on occasion, it might make the reader wince. A stylish, fascinating and compelling story of an unsung pioneer.

Scotland on Sunday

Moores feel for pace and narrative is impeccable. Her book contains just the right amount of background scenery to bring Hunter alive without swamping him.... She is, at last, the biographer Hunter deserves.

The Independent

I have made candles of infants fat
The Sextons have been my slaves,
I have bottled babes unborn, and dried
Hearts and livers from rifled graves.

From The Surgeons Warning,
Robert Southey, Poems , 1799

CHAPTER 1

The Coach Drivers Knee

St. Georges Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, London

December 1785

The patient faced an agonizing choice. Above the cries and moans of fellow sufferers on the fetid ward, he listened as the surgeon outlined the dilemma. If the large swelling at the back of his knee was left to continue growing, it would soon burst, leading to certain and painful death. If, on the other hand, the leg was amputated above the knee, there was a slim chance he would survive the crude operationprovided he did not die of shock on the operating table, or bleed to death soon after, or succumb to infection on the filthy ward days laterbut he would be permanently disabled.

For the forty-five-year-old hackney coach driver, both options were unthinkable. Since he had first noticed the swelling in the hollow behind his knee three years ago, the lump had grown steadily, until it was the size of an orange. It throbbed continuously and was now so painful, he could barely walk. Extended on the hospital bed before him, his leg and foot were hideously swollen, while his skin had turned an unsightly mottled brown. Once the coachman had gained admittance to St. Georges, having persuaded the governors he was a deserving recipient of their charity, the surgeon on duty had lost no time in making a diagnosis. He had seen popliteal aneurysms at exactly the same spot on numerous occasions and knew the prognosis all too well.

It was a common-enough problem in the cabdrivers line of work. Aneurysms could happen to anyone, anywhere in the body, but they appeared to occur with particular frequency among coach drivers, and others in equestrian occupations in Georgian London, in the popliteal artery behind the knee. The condition, in which a section of artery that has been injured or otherwise weakened begins to bulge to form a blood-filled sac, may well have been triggered by the wearing of high leather riding boots, which rubbed the back of the knee. As the aneurysm swelled, it not only became extremely painful but made walking exceedingly difficult. Whatever the cause, the outcome was often an early deathif not from the condition itself, then from the treatment generally meted out. To lose his leg, even supposing the coach driver survived such a drastic procedure in an era long before anesthesia or antiseptics, would mean never being able to work again. But to carry on working, navigating his horse-drawn carriage over Londons rutted and congested roads, would be equally impossible if the lump was left to grow. Either way, the cabbie feared destitution and the workhouse.

But there was a third choice, the surgeon at his bedside now confided on that early December day, for a coachman sufficiently willing or desperate. In his slow Scottish lilt, redolent of his humble farming origins, the surgeon laid out his scheme for a daring new operation. Surrounded by the poxed, maimed, and diseased bodies of Londons poorest wretches, huddled in their beds on the drafty ward, the cabbie resolved to put his life in the hands of John Hunter.