‘The Knife Man’ by Wendy Moore

Why is Wendy Moore not better known and admired by more people? Her books are just wonderful. This is the third my non-fiction reading group has tackled in recent years and it is just as good as the others.

This is a long book, the text comprising 550 pages after which a further eighty pages of notes follow, but it never flags and I found it to be a completely engaging read from start to finish. This is contemporary literary non fiction of the very highest calibre. It reads like a really well-plotted novel.

On the surface it is a straight forward biography, the subject being the eighteenth century surgeon, naturalist / zoologist and educator John Hunter (1728-1793). But it is much much more, in essence being an account of the evolution of medical science, surgical practice and the study of animal species in the eighteenth century.

A Scot who moved to London as a young man, John Hunter was hugely successful as a doctor, earning a heap of money which enabled him ultimately to live prominently and very well in two big properties.

The first was an extraordinary house in Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) which had a posh and wholly respectable front frontage facing the park where he lived with his wife and family, but which led via a lecture theatre to a smaller, dingier lodging house at the back with dissecting rooms and space for his students and apprentices to live.

The second was a country pile in what was then the country village of Earls Court some two miles from London where he kept a menagerie of wild animals in his garden.

However, he spent everything he earned, mainly on exotic remains of both people and animals, for what became a huge collection. Towards the end of his life he opened a museum so that scientists and interested people could view the vast number of exhibits he preserved and catalogued during his lifetime. The museum still exists today, now housed in the Royal College of Surgeons HQ a mile or so away from its original location in Lincolns Inn Fields, Holborn.

Wendy Moore makes no secret of her admiration for Hunter, invariably taking his side when giving an account of the many disputes and quarrels of his life. He was, she argues, invariably right in his judgements as future developments in the various fields he worked in made clear. He was a maverick character in many ways, wholly unqualified in a formal sense, but a man who embraced enlightenment thinking wholeheartedly and pioneered research based on hypothesis, empirical research and experimentation.

In his work he used live subjects (including himself), but mainly made use of ‘cadavers’, namely the bodies of recently deceased people, most of which appear to have been supplied to him wholly illegally by ‘resurrectionists’, commonly known as grave robbers or body-snatchers. Wendy Moore makes clear that many crucial advances in knowledge would not have been possible if there had not been a vigorous trade in bodies in eighteenth century London. Distasteful and appalling in many ways, but ultimately a practice that saved a great many lives.

This was an era before the regulation of medicine and the emergence of a consensus around medical ethics. There were no hygiene protocols, and of course, no anaesthetics. So when John Hunter carried out surgical procedures, his patients were fully conscious and tied down with a cloth in their mouths to prevent too much screaming and yelling. Ghastly, but if the alternative was death, people had no choice but to submit to his knife and bear the pain. He pioneered many new techniques, overturning centuries of flawed medical understanding in the process, but would only ever operate if there was no alternative.

Hunter was a workaholic. He got by on four hours sleep every night, supplemented with a short afternoon nap. He dissected from very early in the morning, gave lectures, saw private patients, worked at St George’s hospital and then in the evenings wrote everything up. It was a punishing schedule, and it is perhaps no great surprise that he essentially worked himself to death at the age of 65, still fighting his corner and pioneering new approaches.

He was interested in all forms life, being very much of the then quite controversial school of thought which saw humans very much as animals. He was interested in plants, but it was living creatures that interested him most, be they tiny insects or huge species of megafauna such as the giraffes he kept. He never quite articulated a Darwinian theory of evolution, but he got pretty close, becoming convinced that species were all interconnected genetically and not separately created by God.

John Hunter was well-connected socially, being a contemporary of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Tobias Smollett, Sheridan, Gainsborough, Adam Smith, David Hume et al, and had occasion to provide services to high born folk including William Pitt the Younger and members of the royal family. In literature he was the inspiration for both Dr Doolittle and Dr Jekyll, and his practical legacy in terms of medical understanding and thinking was substantial. His pupils included Edward Jenner who would go on to pioneer vaccines and effectively cause the elimination of small pox as a disease in the UK.

Quite a chap, yet not the household name he really deserves to be.

This book was marketed to an extent for is supposed shock value. The front cover of my paperback shows a human skull and a quote that suggests it is ‘gruesomely compelling’. This view has some merit. It is not a biography to read if you are squeamish, but it is much more than a shocker. Very scholarly, extraordinarily well-researched, beautifully and engagingly written. Just a really good, first rate, informative read.