Discover the remarkable birth of modern medicine.
When we imagine Renaissance medicine, the cliché is dreadful – unsterile instruments, a total lack of anaesthetics and shocking levels of infant and maternal mortality. And that’s before you get into astrology, bloodletting and a litany of bizarre ‘treatments’, more likely to kill than cure…
As ever, the true picture is somewhat different. Here, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, modern medicine began to take shape. Medical education was being formalised for the first time. Through dissections and hands-on experience in war, surgeons were documenting the intricacies of the human body and distributing their work across the continent. And, as European powers expanded their reach into the New World, new medicines and treatments were being discovered and cultivated.
Historian Alanna Skuse ventures into the bustling medical marketplace of Renaissance England – a world of travelling surgeons, prosthetics’ craftsmen, faith healers and, of course, snake oil salesmen. There’s the domestic healer, her kitchen stocked with all manner of herbs, tonics and elixirs, ready to dole out to ailing neighbours; the expert midwife, called upon when the physician and surgeon failed; the trusted apothecary, shop stocked with remedies for every ailment and ingredients from each corner of the globe. Humane and entrancing, The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack reveals the miraculous birth of modern medicine.
Alanna Skuse is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading. She has published two academic books: Cultural Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England and Selfhood and the Surgically Altered Body in Early Modern England.
'A positive pharmacopoeia of physic from a bygone age. Peeling back the skin of renaissance medicine to reveal that underneath the poultices and potions of unspeakable ingredients there was definitely a method. Eye-opening and perception changing, with just the right amount of gore, a must-read.' —Prof John Tregoning, author of Infectious
'Astonishing… This is not a simple story of cool science overtaking quackery, this is medical progress forged in the fire of experimentation and the creative energy of the times… Skuse's meticulously researched and deliciously detailed book brings a vivid cast of characters out of the shadows, and gives a proper place to the unsung pioneers.’ —Victoria Shepherd, author of A History of Delusions
