Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary SurgeonThe gripping and vividly told story of an early-19th century surgeon and his world, written by a practicing physician who brings us his own insights into modern autopsies and surgery.“When I was four or five years old, my mother took me to see a dead man.” This riveting memory from the author’s own life is the start of Digging up the Dead, a terrific historical narrative and an evocation of a whole world, where surgeons and body-snatchers colluded and conspired because that was the only way surgeons could acquire anatomical experience.Astley Cooper (1768-1841), a tearaway young man from Norfolk who became a fiery radical (he took his pregnant wife to Paris during the Revolution) became a brilliantly successful surgeon. But Cooper’s real passion was dissection. He began with student raids on graveyards, and ended up running a countrywide network of informers and body snatchers, later boasting to a House of Commons enquiry that there was no one in Britain whose body he could not obtain after their death.Author Druin Burch became fascinated by Cooper when he himself was a busy Emergency Room doctor, and here, he sets the past against his own reactions to autopsies and operations, hospitals and poetry. Beautifully written and original, with a touch of the gothic, Digging up the Dead suggests that biography too is a form of dissection and autopsy, which means “to see for oneself.”