Digging Up the Dead

Sep 22, 2024 8:15 AM

Author:Druin Burch

Digging Up the Dead

A tearaway young man from Norfolk, Astley Cooper (1768-1841) became the world's richest and most famous surgeon. Admired from afar by the Brontës and up close by his student Keats, his success was born of an appetite for bloody revolutions.

He set up an international network of bodysnatchers, won the Royal Society's highest prize and boasted to Parliament that there was no one whose body he could not steal. Experimenting on his neighbours' corpses and the living bodies of their stolen pets, his discoveries were as great as his infamy.

Caught up in the French Revolution, and in attempts to bring radical democracy to Britain, Cooper nevertheless rose to become surgeon to royals from the Prince Regent to Queen Victoria. Setting the past against his own reactions to autopsies and operations, hospitals and poetry, Burch's Digging Up the Dead is a riveting account of a world of gothic horror as well as fertile idealism.

Reviews

Druin Burch has written a detailed and deeply felt biography of this colourful figure... Digging Up the Dead is not simply the biography of a great surgeon, but a brilliant portrait of surgical life before the coming of anaesthesia, anitisepsis, antibiotics, and professional regulations

—— Literary Review

A physician himself, Burch brings a special insight into episodes whose significance would doubtless be lost or bungled in the hands of another writer... His detailed analyses of early nineteenth-century medical procedures for treating complicated conditions...are masterful, deft and humane

—— Times Literary Supplement

Vivid account of 18th-century surgeon Astley Cooper's life... Burch, also a doctor, mixes his narrative with recollections from his own practice, which serve to enhance this lively biography...All in all a jolly good read

—— BBC History Magazine

An ambitious and convincing attempt to bring back to life the man who was responsible for so many less respectable acts of resurrection

—— New Statesman

[An] evocative biography... Burch (clearly smitten) dares the reader to empathise with "this vain, egotistical, nepotistic and rather wonderful" man, with considerable success

—— The Lancet

Besides being disgustingly entertaining ... these shocking stories are valuable history. As a doctor himself, Burch evokes the tensions between brutality and beautiful science by informing the historical narrative with his own memoirs

—— New Scientist

Follow the wisdom in "Angel Pets". Coates creates a sound path for us back to what we have known in our hearts all along.

—— Susan Chernak McElroy, author, "Animals as Teachers and Healers"

Lively and combative ... dauntingly well-informed ... injects a welcome dose of common sense into an issue that has been absurdly lacking in it.

—— John Preston , Sunday Telegraph

Piercing...convincing...timely.

—— Ben Hammersley , Financial Times

[M]ore than rewards a respectful reading, not only for the author's impressive knowledge of the internet toolbox...but because of his ability to relate such technological gadgetry to the increasing challenges that are being posed to entrenched authoritarianism

—— James M Murphy , Times Literary Supplement

Selected by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2011

—— New York Times

The year's most unusual travel book

—— Tom Chesshyre , The Times

[An] eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book

—— Daily Telegraph

Written in a delectable prose that scatters flashes of poetry over a sardonic undertow of social comment, Edgelands is a lyrical triumph. On Britain’s grotty margins, the duo trace “desire paths” to find beauty and mystery in the rough darkness on the edge of town

—— Boyd Tonkin , Independent

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