Skip to main content

The Knife Man – Wendy Moore *****

By all our rule of thumb, judge-a-book-by-its-cover responses, this ought not to have been a good read. It’s too fat, appearing to display classic Brysonitis, and it’s a medical biography, and medicine is rather on the fringe when it comes to popular science (to be honest, early medicine was on the fringe of science full stop). And all those body parts can offend a delicate stomach. But just as Mutants was a delightful surprise, so this life of quite remarkable man dispels all the prejudices and wins through as a cracker of a book.
Of course John Hunter himself, the subject of the book, is part of the reason it’s so good. This 18th century doctor and scientists was extreme enough to be the inspiration behind both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide and Dr Doolittle. He was a frenetic dissector, not above obtaining material by dodgy means. But he wasn’t just a meddling quack – Hunter made a huge study of animal life too and made some impressive pre-Darwinian speculation on the origin of species. What makes him a great subject is the way he teeters between heroic scientist and villain – he is the archetype for all the well-meaning mad scientists Hollywood has given us, from Colin Clive’s Frankenstein on.
However, it would be unfair to give all the credit to Hunter himself. Wendy Moore has done a meticulous job in a book that has clearly required a lot of in-depth research. In itself that’s not necessarily the mark of a good book. Totally unreadable scientific papers can be beautifully researched. But Moore manages to give Hunter’s story all the enthusiasm and verve it deserves. Although occasionally a little dry, her prose is always readable and paints an excellent picture of the dark world of 18th century medicine, lit by flickering pockets of knowledge that Hunter attempted, not always wisely, to increase.
There always has to be a small moan – it’s part of our style. It is still a little over-long. There’s a fine line between “comprehensive” and “excessive”, that the book just about treads. And it has reference numbers through the text which simply doesn’t work in a true popular science title – this isn’t supposed to be an academic treatise – if notes are required (and I accept they often are), there are ways to link them to the text without the irritating, flow-disrupting numbers.
What remains, though, is a book that will stay with you a long time – an excellent first outing by Wendy Moore.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you 
Review by Jo Reed

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...