Starting to read more non-fiction, I happened on a biography by Wendy Moore, "The Knife Man - Blood, Body Snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery"; it details the life and works of John Hunter.
He was an energetic, charismatic British surgeon of the late 18th Century whose tireless work pioneered the early development of modern surgery as a medical specialty. It was not easy: he started as an apprentice to his credit-grabbing slave driver older brother, William, a shrewd, social climbing physician to the upper classes in London. He worked long hours through the cold winter months dissecting corpses (some of which he took part in stealing from cemeteries). In those days, there was no legal way for student-surgeons to obtain subjects for dissection, so grave robbing was an enormous trade. (If a less affluent person passed away in the winter months in London at that time, there was a very good chance they would end up on the dissecting table. Condemned criminals and their fa…
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