Conville & Walsh
literary agency
The Knife Man
Blood, Body-snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery
- Author: Wendy Moore
- Category: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Bantam(UK) / Broadway(US)
- Pub date: 1 February 2005
- Length: 359 pages
About The Knife Man
winner of Medical Journalists’ Association Consumer Book Award 2005
A stunning, gruesomely compelling biography… Brilliant
- Alison Weir
Moore’s tireless devotion to detail brings the man and his maverick career vividly, compellingly, gruesomely to life
- NEW YORK TIMES
THE KNIFE MAN is an extraordinary exploration of the birth of modern surgery, through the life of maverick eighteenth-century English surgeon John Hunter, who single-handedly sparked a revolution in surgical care, hauling it out of the realm of magic into the dawn of modern medicine.
THE KNIFE MAN taps straight into our contemporary obsession with all things medical, from TV dramas such as ‘ER’, to the hugely successful medical thrillers of writers such as Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell. As well as being an important work of literary archaeology, it is unique in the growing historical market of books such as LONGITUDE and BATAVIA’S GRAVEYARD.
THE KNIFE MAN is a treasure trove of medical grotesqueries, from contemporary surgical practice to giants, dwarves and dissections, and from body-snatching to scientific breakthroughs and revolutionary theories of evolution. It also charts John Hunter’s extraordinary quest to create a unique museum of human and animal specimens (aided by friends such as Captain Cook) which survives today as Hunter’s Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
About the Author
As a freelance journalist for over 25 years, specialising in health issues, Wendy has written for most national newspapers, including The Times, The Guardian, The Observer and the Sunday Telegraph, as well as for professional and consumer magazines such as the British Medical Journal and History Today. She edited a website on stress for Channel 4 for several years. She has won several awards for her journalism. She currently writes a column on medical history for the BMJ and articles for The Times, Sunday Telegraph and other media.
Wendy’s first book, THE KNIFE MAN, won the Medical Journalists’ Association Consumer Book Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the biennial Marsh Biography Award. Her second book, WEDLOCK, which tells the true story of the remarkable marriage of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, has been highly acclaimed in reviews.
Wendy lives in London with her husband Peter, who is also a journalist, and two children, Sam (15) and Susie (12).