Under the Knife
A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
'This is history with a surgeon's touch: deft, incisive and sometimes excruciatingly bloody' The Sunday Times
'Utterly eccentric and riveting' Mail on Sunday
'Eye-opening and, frequently, eye-watering . . . a book that invites readers to peer up the bottoms of kings, into the souls of rock stars and down the ear canals of astronauts' The Daily Telegraph
How did a decision made in the operating theatre spark hundreds of conspiracy theories about JFK?
How did a backstage joke prove fatal to world-famous escape artist Harry Houdini?
How did Queen Victoria change the course of surgical history?
Through dark centuries of bloodletting and of amputations without anaesthetic to today's sterile, high-tech operating theatres, surgeon Arnold van de Laar uses his experience and expertise to tell an incisive history of the past, present and future of surgery.
From the dark centuries of bloodletting and of amputations without anaesthetic to today's sterile, high-tech operating theatres, Under the Knife is both a rich cultural history, and a modern anatomy class for us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Amsterdam surgeon Van de Laar devotes his first book to vivid descriptions of notable surgeries, from ancient times to the present. Trial, error, and gore fill these lively accounts of professionals (and a few amateurs) wielding the scalpel to remedy bodily affliction. Van de Laar captures the drama in the Dallas operating room where Lee Harvey Oswald was admitted with acute injuries to the aorta and interior vena cava. He depicts Italian surgeons using their hands to scoop blood clots out of John Paul II's abdomen after the 1981 attempt on the Pope's life, and recounts how a Dutch blacksmith successfully cut into his own body in 1651 to remove a kidney stone. Van de Laar also includes numerous asides on medical topics such as the causes of fever and the art of tying surgical knots. He spotlights famous practitioners, including Rudolf Nissen, who used cellophane "essentially a sandwich bag" to wrap a grapefruit-size aneurysm in Albert Einstein, and Malcolm Perry, who was in the operating room for both the Kennedy and Oswald shootings. Fast-paced and lucid, this is medical history not for those with weak stomachs.
