The Butchering Art

Here is my favourite passage from the book, and a good intro to the tone of Fitzharris' writing - on Liston, a surgeon who practiced a time before anesthesia when speed was the most valuable asset one could have when performing surgery:“Liston's speed was both a gift and a curse. Once, he accidentally sliced off a patient's testicle along with the leg he was amputating. His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant's fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator's coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.”I love medical history. LOVE it. I love the body-horror of it all, the gross spectacle of it, but also how it makes me appreciate being alive when I am and imagining what it must have been like to be a person living then - my wariness of hospitals now has nothing on what someone must have felt back then when so many people who went in never came out. I like thinking about the things that we don't know about now that someone 100 years in the future will be thinking, man, I'm so glad I didn't live in the early 21st century when they didn't even know how to regrow limbs or treat cancer without poisoning themselves! How terrible!I also love the stories, like this one, about how we (collectively as society) gain knowledge about things and how hard the process is. How pushback occurs because of inertia and things that we just feel are true and economics and politics etc. This book talks about the competition between miasma and germ theory at the time. Miasma theory held that disease occurs spontaneously from unhygienic conditions, so there was more disease in big cities because everyone dumped their shit in the streets and there was little clean water and little fresh air and those conditions just caused diseases to occur. Germ theory held that tiny particles (which were sometimes called “animalcules” which is a really adorable word to me) could be passed from person to person through touch or through the air or other mediums like water or goods were what caused disease (for more on this you can also read [b: The Ghost Map 36086 The Ghost Map The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World Steven Johnson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1430524696s/36086.jpg 1008989] which talks about how John Snow proved that cholera was being transmitted through the water from a certain pump in London). So some people liked miasma theory because they felt the facts pointed that way, some because that's what they'd been taught and didn't feel the need to explore further than that, but also there were economic/political factors that caused people to support it. People who believed germ theory recommended that whenever there was an outbreak of disease in another country, Britain should put a temporary stop on imports to prevent the disease from spreading. Some politicians and businessmen supported miasma theory because that was the one that wouldn't halt trade and lose them money whenever there was a potential for outbreak. This is one thing that we can't look back on and think, “how barbaric” because it still happens now! What caused the water crisis in Flint and what's preventing it from being dealt with swiftly and carefully? Money, politics. Books like this one can really show us how much things have changed but also how much they stay the same (to our definite detriment).So! This book is recommended if you like reading about gross medical history, if you like learning about scientific process and progress, and if you like outraging yourself about how little compassion is involved in large-scale and long-term decision making.