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Smallpox! Rabies! Black Death! Throughout history humankind has
been plagued by . . . well, by plagues. The symptoms of these
diseases were gruesome-but the remedies were even worse. Get to
know the ickiest illnesses that have infected humans and affected
civilizations through the ages. Each chapter explores the story of
a disease, including the scary symptoms, kooky cures, and brilliant
breakthroughs that it spawned. Medical historian and bestselling
author Lindsey Fitzharris lays out the facts with her trademark
wit, and Adrian Teal adds humor with cartoons and caricatures drawn
in pitch black and blood red. Diseases covered in this book include
bubonic plague, smallpox, rabies, tuberculosis, cholera, and
scurvy. Thanks to centuries of sickness and a host of history's
most determined plague-busters, this riveting book features
everything you've ever wanted to know about the world's deadliest
diseases.
From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western
Front, one thing was clear: mankind's military technology had
wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. The war's new weaponry,
from tanks to shrapnel, enabled slaughter on an industrial scale,
and given the nature of trench warfare, thousands of soldiers
sustained facial injuries. Medical advances meant that more
survived their wounds than ever before, yet disfigured soldiers did
not receive the hero's welcome they deserved. In The Facemaker,
award-winning historian Lindsey Fitzharris tells the astonishing
story of the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who
dedicated himself to restoring the faces - and the identities - of
a brutalized generation. Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New
Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic
surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front.
Returning to Britain, he established one of the world's first
hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction in Sidcup,
south-east England. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of
doctors, nurses and artists whose task was to recreate what had
been torn apart. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a
hero, but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely
intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of
the wounded but also their spirits. Meticulously researched and
grippingly told, The Facemaker places Gillies's ingenious surgical
innovations alongside the poignant stories of soldiers whose lives
were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how
medicine and art can merge, and of what courage and imagination can
accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.
DAILY MAIL, GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 Winner of
the 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
Shortlisted for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize Shortlisted for the
2018 Wolfson Prize The story of a visionary British surgeon whose
quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern
world - the safest time to be alive in human history In The
Butchering Art, historian Lindsey Fitzharris recreates a critical
turning point in the history of medicine, when Joseph Lister
transformed surgery from a brutal, harrowing practice to the safe,
vaunted profession we know today. Victorian operating theatres were
known as 'gateways of death', Fitzharris reminds us, since half of
those who underwent surgery didn't survive the experience. This was
an era when a broken leg could lead to amputation, when surgeons
often lacked university degrees, and were still known to ransack
cemeteries to find cadavers. While the discovery of anaesthesia
somewhat lessened the misery for patients, ironically it led to
more deaths, as surgeons took greater risks. In squalid,
overcrowded hospitals, doctors remained baffled by the persistent
infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time
when surgery couldn't have been more dangerous, an unlikely figure
stepped forward: Joseph Lister, a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon.
By making the audacious claim that germs were the source of all
infection - and could be treated with antiseptics - he changed the
history of medicine forever. With a novelist's eye for detail,
Fitzharris brilliantly conjures up the grisly world of Victorian
surgery, revealing how one of Britain's greatest medical minds
finally brought centuries of savagery, sawing and gangrene to an
end.
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