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Wendy Moore, The knife man: the extraordinary life and times of John Hunter, father of modern surgery, London, Bantam Press, 2005, pp. xiii, 482, illus., £18.99 (hardback 0593-05209-9).
The knife man is Wendy Moore's exhaustive biography of John Hunter, the eighteenth-century Scot who is often found to be residing under the label of "founding father" of modem surgery. It charts the rise of Hunter from his poor childhood home in Lanarkshire, where he displayed early on a strong curiosity for the natural world around him, to his move to London to work as an assistant to his brother William, and on to the forging of his own career as London's best known surgeon and anatomist.
The book paints a vivid picture of Hunter's fascinating and often controversial work in anatomy and Moore readily casts him in the role of misunderstood maverick bom before his time, whose devotion to the values of experimentation and observation rather than classical medical theory led to a "revolutionary impact on surgery" (p. 400). Hunter's approach to his studies reflected his personality: brilliant but brusque, kind yet quick tempered, he was admired and disliked in equal measure by his contemporaries, and his complete absorption in his work frequently isolated him from them altogether. For Hunter the lines between work and...