The Knife Man; Blood, Body-Snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery
by Wendy Moore
Bantam Books, 2006.
Paper, 640 pages.

Funny how I’d always confused John Hunter with his brother William whose reputation as a prig more concerned with titles and position than with surgery filtered down to me through histories of science and the times that I’d read. And of course I’d come across the Hunter name in connection with lurid tales of body snatching and the gut-dabbling “Jack Tearguts” of Blake’s “An Island In The Moon,” which gives us the verbal equivalent of a Gillray print. Now Wendy Moore has brought clarity to this subject, and I now see that John Hunter was indeed on the cutting edge (forgive the pun!) of his profession! Moore takes us through the streets of Johnsonian London, complete with pavements slick with chamber pot slops, poor children willing to sell healthy teeth and mangle their smiles forever so that the smiles of the elite could be temporarily refurbished for tremendous sums, and every kind of illness ready to hurry man, woman and child to an early end and task their brief existences with gleets, tumors, stones, tremors, rots and imposthumes before they expired. Through it all stalked keen-witted John (”Jack”) Hunter, skilled in teasing apart the threads and fibers of nerves and separating the anatomical processes for preparations that are still pointed to for the genius they display, and unafraid to spend long hours in the presence of the dead when the Ghost of Cock Lane made headlines in the daily papers. Like William Blake, Hunter was a plain speaker, totally sure of his abilities, and this of course brought him enemies by the dozens from among the tribe of doctors and surgeons who relied on reading “the Ancient Classics” on medicine and an old boy system to put them in positions of power. Hunter, on the other hand, was almost alone in his insistence on learning from close observation and trial and error. In an age when surgery was done with dirty fingernails and aprons stiff with dried blood, this system perhaps did not bring much visible change to the sad lives of those stricken by ill health, but it was the key to the invention of new techniques and the arrival of our modern understanding of the human body. But this is not all; Moore also shows us that this wide-ranging intellect was intent on understanding the well-springs of life and the “living principle” itself and fashioned an early form of evolutionary theory which he taught to his students. However, there is indeed an unsavory, and even a sinister side to this story. Hunter grows obsessed with obtaining the bones of a young Irish Giant, and he does so against the poor man’s death bed wishes. The literary salon that Hunter’s beautiful wife sponsors once a week takes place while Hunter and his crew of helpers and students unload bodies delivered by the resurrectionists to the basement door. We can only imagine the occasional smell of decay wafting up the stairs while Horace Walpole holds forth in powdered wig on the superiority of English literature. The surgeon grows more and more eccentric, because perhaps his mid-life experiment involving syphilitic self-inoculation was having unexpected ramifications. Moore also tells us about Hunter’s menagerie and his practice of wide-awake, bug-eyed, howling vivisection-unto-death, which would horrify animal rights activists today. Still and all, the Jack Hunter of Wendy Moore’s book is a real hero.

Though the writing in The Knife Man can sometimes be redundant, the style is good and the content compelling, if at times, a little grim. I recommend this book highly.