Arnold van de Laar

I've been on quite a nonfiction kick this year, haven't I? Anyway, usual disclaimer: opinions expressed in this review are my own and do not reflect those of my employers.

I picked this up mostly for fun and fast reading, and because the short chapters suit my current mood (overwhelmed by doing a master's program in the evening while working full time, and in need of a quick escape from the glare of the computer screen before bed). Plus I am interested in popular medical books because both my parents and my sister are in different aspects of health care. Plus again, the back-back-back burner novel I mentioned in my last review involves a surgeon and two surgeries (though neither type of surgery was described in this book).

Van de Laar provides a very casual introduction to different kinds of surgery throughout history. Very casual--there are no citations in the text, a few of the chapters aren't actually about surgery, and I wasn't totally clear on why the chapters were arranged in the order that they were. Chapters on John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were at opposite ends of the book. One chapter about diagnosis actually talked about fictional detectives, which seemed a bit like pandering to a popular audience to me--and the fact that van de Laar talked about the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle had medical experience but failed to mention that Doyle's mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, was actually the one with observational techniques that inspired Sherlock Holmes' style of deduction felt like a major omission. Bell would have been a more interesting focus for the chapter than fictional detectives--not even doctors!

It also stings that in the era of the #metoo movement there's not a single female surgeon described in this book. Surely women must have made some valuable contributions in the history of surgery. Since a couple of the chapters aren't actually about surgery, then off the top of my head I would say that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu would be worth a mention for her work in bringing inoculation against smallpox into Europe (read the excellent [b:The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox|1002535|The Speckled Monster A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox|Jennifer Lee Carrell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1309281718s/1002535.jpg|707889] for more information about her).

Finally, the book is definitely written for a non-U.S. audience: some medical vocabulary is European rather than American (the large intestine is the "great intestine", and it's "paediatric" rather than "pediatric" for example); and Celsius and meters/centimeters are used instead of Fahrenheit and feet/inches. I mean, it's only fair, given that the U.S. is a special snowflake that does things differently from the rest of the sensibly Metric world, but on the other hand, this is a U.S. edition...

But the historical anecdotes were interesting and amusing. I may have a tougher stomach than some, but there were certainly some graphic depictions of diseases and operations that had me making funny faces on the subway--to the amusement, I sometimes noticed, of my fellow riders. I may have also had too much fun reading any operation on male genitals to the S.O. in my life. The book got its revenge his behalf with the chapter on Queen Caroline's umbilical hernia.

Overall, this was a fun and fluffy history of surgery...but definitely not a good source to cite for any kind of academic writing.

And now, time to stop procrastinating and get back to homework!… (lisätietoja)

The thing is, I love historical medicine, so this book is entirely up my alley. Another thing I love is that van de Laar seems as interested in language as I am so he often will indicate the meaning or etymology of medical terms when he brings them up.
Also this is the second book I've read that includes my now-favourite medical history anecdote, of Dr Liston, working before anaesthesia, who could cut with such speed that he once accidentally sliced off the fingers of his assistant, whose massive blood loss caused a spectator to die of shock, and later both the assistant and the patient died from infection, making this the only recorded surgery with a 300% mortality rate.… (lisätietoja)