Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon

Digging Up the Dead

The gripping unknown story of a surgeon and his world (from grave robbers to the Prince Regent), told vividly from the inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Druin Burch works as a hospital doctor in Oxford, and is the author of Taking the Medicine.

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.

Druin Burch

A fascinating history of the development of clinical trials and the thinking behind them

For all the wizardry of modern medicine, with its bionic limbs and targeted drugs, doctors still cannot assume they have all the answers. This book offers a valuable inoculation against complacency

Taking The Medicine is both an assault on the myths of the infallible doctor and a history of pharmacology - the search for the one, true treatment... Burch makes a compelling case

Each chapter is a self-contained pleasure to read, like mini-fables on the perils of medicine

Burch approaches his task with vigour and pace, exploring the therapeutic failures of doctors over the ages...there is much of interest as the story unfolds

Burch leads us through an array of shocking and surprising medical practices

Twenty-five essay-chapters examine 'cures' such as aspirin and thalidomide, all with a good bedside manner

This is a gripping history of the blundering progress of medicine

A fascinating and irreverent history of medicine and those who've claimed to understand it, written by an NHS doctor with searing intelligence and a lively wit

A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and our Difficulty Swallowing It

Doctors and patients alike trust the medical profession and its therapeutic powers; yet this trust has often been misplaced. Whether prescribing opium or thalidomide, aspirin or antidepressants, doctors have persistently failed to test their favourite ideas - often with catastrophic results. From revolutionary America to Nazi Germany and modern big-pharmaceuticals, this is the unexpected story of just how bad medicine has been, and of its remarkably recent effort to improve. 
 
It is the history of well-meaning doctors misled by intuition, of the startling human cost of their mistakes and of the exceptional individuals who have helped make things better. Alarming and optimistic, Taking the Medicine is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why to trust the pills they swallow.

Druin Burch

Praise for Taking the Medicine

A fascinating history of the development of clinical trials and the thinking behind them

For all the wizardry of modern medicine, with its bionic limbs and targeted drugs, doctors still cannot assume they have all the answers. This book offers a valuable inoculation against complacency

Taking The Medicine is both an assault on the myths of the infallible doctor and a history of pharmacology - the search for the one, true treatment... Burch makes a compelling case

A fascinating history of the development of clinical trials and the thinking behind them

For all the wizardry of modern medicine, with its bionic limbs and targeted drugs, doctors still cannot assume they have all the answers. This book offers a valuable inoculation against complacency

Taking The Medicine is both an assault on the myths of the infallible doctor and a history of pharmacology - the search for the one, true treatment... Burch makes a compelling case

A fascinating history of the development of clinical trials and the thinking behind them

For all the wizardry of modern medicine, with its bionic limbs and targeted drugs, doctors still cannot assume they have all the answers. This book offers a valuable inoculation against complacency

Taking The Medicine is both an assault on the myths of the infallible doctor and a history of pharmacology - the search for the one, true treatment... Burch makes a compelling case

Books by Druin Burch

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