Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon [Paperback]

." . . a brilliant portrait of surgical life before anesthesia, antiseptics, antibiotics and professional regulations."-"Literary Review"

`the author....give[s] readers a balanced and objective life of an extra-ordinary man'

`the author....give[s] readers a balanced and objective life of an extra-ordinary man'

'Cooper, the resurrection man, would have approved both the
sentiment and this biography.' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The gripping unknown story of a surgeon and his world (from grave robbers to the Prince Regent), told vividly from the inside by someone who is himself a young practising physician, who gives us a real insight into medical history and adds his own intimate, modern experience.

'Burch is at his best.'
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

'Burch is an expert guide to the clinical reality of surgery in
Cooper's day' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

'does justice to a complex and not altogether pleasant man with
wit and intelligence'
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"a brilliant portrait of surgical life before the coming of anaesthesia, anitisepsis, antibiotics, and professional regulations" --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"In this vivid account of 18th-century surgeon Astley Cooper's
life, Druin Burch tells of how the master dissector rose to become Royal
Surgeon to three successive monarchs and a member of the Royal Society...
Burch, also a doctor, mixes his narrative with recollections with
recollections from his own practice, which serve to enhance this lively
biography... All in all, a jolly good read"
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

A tearaway young man from Norfolk, Astley Cooper (1768-1841) became the world's richest and most famous surgeon. Admired from afar by the Brontës 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.

The gripping unknown story of a surgeon and his world (from grave robbers to the Prince Regent), told vividly from the inside by someone who is himself a young practising physician, who gives us a real insight into medical history and adds his own intimate, modern experience. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Druin Burch, 34, studied Human Sciences at Oxford. After research in human and chimpanzee genetics, he studied medicine and has worked in hospitals across south east England. He teaches human evolution, physiology and ecology at Oxford, and writes for medical journals, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. This is his first book. He lives in the Cotswolds.