Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon

Digging Up the Dead by Druin Burch. A tearaway young man from Up the Dead. Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon.
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Cooper was the father of vascular surgery and made pioneering contributions to the treatment of hernias and the surgery of the breast. His body was placed in a lead lined coffin to protect him from the resurrection men and interred in the crypt of the chapel at Guy's in I sometimes park my car only a few metres from Cooper's mortal remains and am sure that, if not actually turning in his grave, he is moving uncomfortably to try to get a better look at what is happening to medicine in the 21st century.

Cooper is likely to be surprised by the large number of medical students that we now admit each year and by the heterogeneity of the student body. He might well see these large numbers as a commercial opportunity: He fell out with Thomas Wakley, the founding editor of the Lancet , because Wakley stole his lectures and, by publishing them, reduced the need for students to attend and pay for the lectures.

Cooper stormed round to Wakley's house to remonstrate with him, posing as a patient to gain entrance. Striding into Wakley's study, Cooper found him correcting the proofs of one of his very own lectures. The element of farce was not lost on either man—both burst into laughter and became firm friends. Cooper would also have been concerned to see the gradual replacement of cadaveric dissection with prosection and three dimensional electronic images.

Dexterity, precision, and detailed anatomical knowledge were, in an era without antibiotics and anaesthesia, prerequisites for safe and swift surgery and, in Cooper's view, could be acquired only through relentless dissection. The Anatomy Act of , passed shortly before Cooper's death, put an end to the lucrative activities of the body snatchers but made dissection the legal fate of the poor—if no one claimed your body, or you were too poor to pay for a funeral, you were sent to the surgeons.

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Finally, Cooper would undoubtedly have been horrified by the medical training application service MTAS , though for reasons different from those that have led to two unprecedented parliamentary apologies. MTAS is designed to simplify applications for medical training posts and to promote equity and selection on merit; Cooper, however, was a great believer in patronage and nepotism.

When the governors of the Borough hospitals refused to appoint his nephew and biographer, Bransby Cooper, to succeed him as senior surgeon at Guy's, the ensuing row led to a split between the two institutions, which persisted until the re-merger. Burch's book has many vivid and gripping accounts of a truly extraordinary man living in extraordinary times. Don't have an account?

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Digging Up the Dead, Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon by Druin Burch

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