The Mesmerist : The Society Doctor Who Held Victorian London Spellbound Paperback
by Wendy Moore
Paperback
Description
Medicine, in the early 1800s, was a brutal business.
Operations were performed without anaesthesia while conventional treatment relied on leeches, cupping and toxic potions.
The most surgeons could offer by way of pain relief was a large swig of brandy.
Into this scene came John Elliotson, the dazzling new hope of the medical world.
Charismatic and ambitious, Elliotson was determined to transform medicine from a hodge-podge of archaic remedies into a practice informed by the latest science.
In this aim he was backed by Thomas Wakley, founder of the new magazine, the Lancet, and a campaigner against corruption and malpractice. Then, in the summer of 1837, a French visitor - the self-styled Baron Jules Denis Dupotet - arrived in London to promote an exotic new idea: mesmerism.
The mesmerism mania would take the nation by storm but would ultimately split the two friends, and the medical world, asunder - throwing into focus fundamental questions about the fine line between medicine and quackery, between science and superstition.
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Item not Available
- Format:Paperback
- Pages:320 pages
- Publisher:Orion Publishing Co
- Publication Date:27/04/2017
- Category:
- ISBN:9781474602303
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Information
-
Item not Available
- Format:Paperback
- Pages:320 pages
- Publisher:Orion Publishing Co
- Publication Date:27/04/2017
- Category:
- ISBN:9781474602303