 "The Butchering Art")
Books about Victorian medicine are an acquired taste. They’re science by way of B-horror movies, tales of progress set amid blood and spatter and grey guts. To enjoy them requires a tolerance for ick, an enthusiasm for the macabre and (ideally) the iron discipline not to read before supper, especially if that supper is a nice steak.
Lindsey Fitzharris’s slim, atmospheric The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine has its share of resplendent gore. (The author, a medical historian, has a charming blog and a YouTube series called Under the Knife.) The book is
