PublishedJohn Murray, January 2018 |
ISBN9781473633667 |
FormatSoftcover, 368 pages |
Dimensions23.4cm × 15.3cm × 2.6cm |
UNDER THE KNIFE, surgeon Arnold Van de Laar uses his own experience and expertise to tell the witty history of the past, present and future of surgery.
From the story of the desperate man from seventeenth-century Amsterdam who grimly cut a stone out of his own bladder to Bob Marley's deadly toe infection, UNDER THE KNIFE offers all kinds of fascinating and unforgettable insights into medicine and history via the operating theatre.
What happens during an operation? How does the human body respond to being attacked by a knife, a bacterium, a cancer cell or a bullet? And, as medical advances continuously push the boundaries of what medicine can cure, what are the limits 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.
Bill is one of the founders of Boffins and has been involved in selecting the books we stock since our beginning in 1989. His favourite reading is history, with psychology, current affairs, and business books coming close behind. His hobbies are reading, food, reading, drinking, reading, and sleeping.
This fascinating book is written by a Dutch surgeon and tells the history of surgery in a way that will have you spellbound. Looking at 28 different surgical operations, Van de Laar shows us how they evolved, often from fairly brutal and invasive procedures to what are now usually refined, safer and quicker ones. You’ll learn so much in this book, and look at modern surgery with great respect. You’ll meet a host of familiar faces from history from Louis XVI to Lee Harvey Oswald, but best of all you’ll meet an amazing collection of ground-breaking surgeons whose inventiveness and tenacity, as well as their skill with the scalpel, have brought us successful cures for so many conditions that were once either debilitating or deadly.
