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The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery
In an era when bloodletting was considered a cure for everything from colds to smallpox, surgeon John Hunter was a medical innovator, an eccentric, and the person to whom anyone who has ever had surgery probably owes his or her life. In this sensational and macabre story, we meet the surgeon who counted not only luminaries Benjamin Franklin, Lord Byron, Adam Smith, and Thomas Gainsborough among his patients but also “resurrection men” among his close acquaintances. A captivating portrait of his ruthless devotion to uncovering the secrets of the human body, and the extraordinary lengths to which he went to do so—including body snatching, performing pioneering medical experiments, and infecting himself with venereal disease—this rich historical narrative at last acknowledges this fascinating man and the debt we owe him today..
Price: $5.00
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Death, Dissection and the Destitute
In the early nineteenth century, body snatching was rife because the only corpses available for medical study were those of hanged murderers With the Anatomy Act of 1832, however, the bodies of those who died destitute in workhouses were appropriated for dissection. At a time when such a procedure was regarded with fear and revulsion, the Anatomy Act effectively rendered dissection a punishment for poverty. Providing both historical and contemporary insights, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute opens rich new prospects in history and history of science. The new afterword draws important parallels between social and medical history and contemporary concerns regarding organs for transplant and human tissue for research. .
Price: $12.86
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An Acquaintance with Darkness (Great Episodes)
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The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London
"A work of great skill and sympathy, a meditation on one of the sorrowful mysteries once to be found on the streets of London. For any student of the city and its secret life, it is indispensable reading." -Peter Ackroyd, The Times (London)Before his murder in 1831, the "Italian boy" was one of thousands of orphans on the streets of London, begging among the livestock, hawkers, and con men. When his body was sold to a medical college, the suppliers were arrested for murder. Their high-profile trial would unveil a furtive trade in human corpses carried out by "resurrection men" who killed to satisfy the first rule of the cadaver market: the fresher the body, the higher the price. Historian Sarah Wise reconstructs not only the boy's murder but the chaos and squalor of his world. In 1831 London, the poor were desperate and the wealthy petrified, the population swelling so fast that class borders could not hold. All the while, early humanitarians were attempting to protect the disenfranchised, the courts were establishing norms of punishment, and doctors were pioneering the science of anatomy. As vivid and intricate as a novel by Charles Dickens, The Italian Boy restores to history the lives of the very poorest Londoners and offers an unparalleled account of England's great metropolis at the brink of a major transformation. .
Price: $1.50
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The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery
When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he based the house of the genial doctor-turned-fiend on the home of John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter was both widely acclaimed and greatly feared.
From humble origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the eighteenth century. In an age when operations were crude, extremely painful, and often fatal, he rejected medieval traditions to forge a revolution in surgery founded on pioneering scientific experiments. Using the knowledge he gained from countless human dissections, Hunter worked to improve medical care for both the poorest and the best-known figures of the era—including Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron.
An insatiable student of all life-forms, Hunter was also an expert naturalist. He kept exotic creatures in his country menagerie and dissected the first animals brought back by Captain Cook from Australia. Ultimately his research led him to expound highly controversial views on the age of the earth, as well as equally heretical beliefs on the origins of life more than sixty years before Darwin published his famous theory.
Although a central figure of the Enlightenment, Hunter’s tireless quest for human corpses immersed him deep in the sinister world of body snatching. He paid exorbitant sums for stolen cadavers and even plotted successfully to steal the body of Charles Byrne, famous in his day as the “Irish giant.”
In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter’s murky and macabre world—a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine. .
Price: $7.96
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Resurrection Men
London, 1830s. Twelve-year-old Victor, an orphan, knows that life is dangerous, and death by disease or accident is common. But to Mr. Tipple and Mr. Biggs, these are streets teeming with possibility, where a child, once dead, is a commodity, and a “fresh subject” can fetch as much as nine guineas In this dark underworld, Victor must uncover the identity of the ghoulish murderer who is at the heart of London’s furtive trade in human corpses. T. K. Welsh, author of The Unresolved, spins an intricate and chilling story of greed, malevolence, and redemption based on the body-snatcher trials of 1831..
Price: $19.70
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Body Snatching: The Robbing of Graves for the Education of Physicians in Early Nineteenth Century America
Also called ?resurrectionists, ? body snatchers, were careful not to take anything from the grave but the body?stealing only the corpse was not considered a felony since the courts had already said that a dead body had no owner. (?Burking??i.e., murder?was the alternative method of supplying ?stiffs? to medical schools; it is covered here as well). This book recounts the practice of grave robbing for the medical education of American medical students and physicians during the late 1700s and 1800s in the US, why body snatching came about and how disinterment was done, and presents information on: efforts to prevent the practice, a group of professional grave robbers, and the European experience..
Price: $34.44
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Coin Snatching: The Reputation Builder
Complete resource for ways to speed-grab and speed-switch one coin for another in a participant's hand. You really snatch the coin out of your spectator's hand and leave another in its place. Covers the Beginner's Grab, the Rochester Switch, Kip's Take, the Upside-Down Impossible Coin Grab and more. Coin Snatching is filled with advice on building one's reputation -- a must for magicians, martial artists, jugglers, bartenders, and anyone who wants to impress with a demonstration of super speed and reflexes. Coin Snatching also includes a complete history of the art, story lines, patter suggestions, presentation tips, and two bonuses by famous magicians John Calvert and Justin Hanes..
Price: $29.95
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