Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon

The 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.”