Alanna Skuse: The Surgeon, the Midwife, the Quack, Gebunden

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Discover the remarkable birth of modern medicine.

The cliched view medicine in the Renaissance world is dreadful - gore-splattered hacksaws and no whiff of

any anaesthetics or antibiotics. And that's before you delve into arsenic potions, the theory of humours and all those leeches...

Reality, however, proves somewhat different.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a medical revolution was afoot. Physicians' education was being

formalised. Surgeons were documenting the intricacies of the human body with ever-greater skill. And, as European powers expanded into the New World, novel medicines and treatments were being discovered.

Alanna Skuse ventures into the bustling medical marketplace of Renaissance England - a world of travelling surgeons, prosthetics craftsmen, faith healers and snake oil merchants. There's the domestic healer, always ready to dole out tonics and elixirs to her ailing neighbours; the expert midwife, called upon when the physician and surgeon failed; the trusted apothecary, his shop stocked with remedies from across the globe. Humane and entrancing, The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack reveals the people and stories behind a scientific revolution.