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Synopsis
"When I was four or five years old my mother took me to see a dead man." This riveting memory from the author’s own life is the start of a historical narrative and an evocation of a world where surgeons and body-snatchers colluded and conspired. It tells the story of Astley Cooper (1768 1841), a reckless young man who became a fiery radical and a brilliantly successful surgeon. He was a student of the famous John Hunter, the teacher of John Keats when the poet was a medical student, and the first person to describe the function of the middle ear. Surgeon to three successive British kings, when Cooper died it was said that he had "earned more than any surgeon or lawyer that ever lived," and his funeral drew huge crowds. The village where he had spent his last years was hung with black and a statue of him was placed in St. Paul’s. But Cooper’s real passion was dissection: he began with student raids on graveyards as well as on neighbors’ cats and dogs, and ended up running a country-wide network of informers and body snatchers. He would boast to a House of Commons inquiry that there was no man or woman in Britain whose body he could not obtain after their death. Druin Burch became fascinated by Cooper when he was working as a doctor, and he sets the past against his own reactions to autopsies and operations, hospitals and poetry. Beautifully written and brilliantly original with a touch of the gothic, this volume suggests that biography is a form of dissection, anatomizing, and autopsy.
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About the Author
Druin Burch is a professor at Oxford and has contributed to The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.
Review
“. . . a brilliant portrait of surgical life before anesthesia, antiseptics, antibiotics and professional regulations.”–Literary Review
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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- PublisherRandom House UK
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 0701179856
- ISBN 13 9780701179854
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages288
- Rating
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Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon
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Digging Up the Dead: The Life and Times of Astley Cooper, an Extraordinary Surgeon
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Hardcover. Condition: Fair. No Jacket. Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.25. Seller Inventory # G0701179856I5N00
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Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon
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Hardback. Condition: Very Good. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR001939437
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Digging up the Dead : Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon
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Digging up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon
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Chatto & Windus, London, 2007
ISBN 10: 0701179856
ISBN 13: 9780701179854
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hardcover. Condition: very good. Dust Jacket Condition: very good. Illustrated with black and white photographs. 276 pages. 8vo, black boards, dust wrapper. London: Chatto & Windus, (2007). Pages toned and with scattered staining and foxing at edges -- a very good copy in a very good dust wrapper. Seller Inventory # 305828
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Digging Up the Dead: The Life and Times of Astley Cooper, an Extraordinary Surgeon
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Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon
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Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon
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Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon [Hardcover] Burch, Druin
Seller: Hay-on-Wye Booksellers, Hay-on-Wye, HEREF, United Kingdom
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Digging Up The Dead : Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon
Seller: Barclay Books, York, WA, Australia
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Hardback. A tearaway young man from Norfolk, Astley Cooper (1768-1841) became the world's richest and most famous surgeon. Admired from afar by the Brontes and up close by his student Keats, his success was born of an appetite for bloody revolutions. He set up an international network of bodysnatchers, won the Royal Society's highest prize and boasted to Parliament that there was no one whose body he could not steal. Experimenting on his neighbours' corpses and the living bodies of their stolen pets, his discoveries were as great as his infamy. Caught up in the French Revolution, and in attempts to bring radical democracy to Britain, Cooper nevertheless rose to become surgeon to royals from the Prince Regent to Queen Victoria. Setting the past against his own reactions to autopsies and operations, hospitals and poetry, Burch's Digging Up the Dead is a riveting account of a world of gothic horror as well as fertile idealism. 2007. A fine, unmarked and unread copy in a near fine, unclipped d/w only marked by a price sticker on the rear panel. Scans available if required. 2.6 Centimeters X 16.1 Centimeters X 24.1 Centimeters. Seller Inventory # 18307508
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