Book Club Starts 08/15/22
Welcome to the Museum of Mortality Book Club
We are going to start doing a book club with our favorite books. We have signed up to be an amazon affiliate so if you purchase the book through our link we will receive a small portion of the sales to help us grow. The book image is a clickable link.
We are going to start doing a book club with our favorite books. We have signed up to be an amazon affiliate so if you purchase the book through our link we will receive a small portion of the sales to help us grow. The book image is a clickable link.
First Book
Our first book we have chosen is:
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters―no place for the squeamish―and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course of history.
Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister’s career path to his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to Lister’s contemporaries―some of them brilliant, some outright criminal―and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers.
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters―no place for the squeamish―and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course of history.
Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister’s career path to his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to Lister’s contemporaries―some of them brilliant, some outright criminal―and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers.
Click the book image below to purchase.
With the book club, I will post 1 or so books a month. You are not required to buy the book, or read the book. After the date assigned to the book of the month, I will post questions, answer questions, and also make some videos to go along with the book of the month. The videos will be posted to our TikTok, Youtube, as well as our Facebook page so make sure you are subscribed to our social medias. If you have questions on the book, feel free to email us your questions.
