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Sat 05 May 2007At the cutting edge of early surgeryBiographyThis is an excellent book of superlative horror, about surgery before anaesthetics, when doctors depended on grave-robbers to supply cadavers for experimental dissection.Druin Burch, a 34-year-old physician of admirable literary suavity, when working in the A&E rooms of hospitals in England became interested in what his job was like in even more arduous conditions two centuries ago. He is both rigorously objective medically and subjectively humane. He teaches human evolution, physiology and ecology at Oxford, writes for the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian, and appreciates birdsong and flowers in his garden in the Cotswolds. He seems to be the sort of doctor who would be welcome beside any deathbed. Such is his expert knowledge and charm that it might prove not to be a deathbed after all.