Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Digging Up the Dead : Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon, Paperback / softback Book

Digging Up the Dead : Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Out of stock

Description

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.

Information

Other Formats

Save 18%

£15.99

£13.05

Out of stock
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information