Reminds Me of an Old Boyfriend ...

The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery by Wendy Moore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was an interesting book, if a bit dry and lacking in illustration.  Hunter's controversy-bedecked life is an interesting one.  He was both admirably correct and terribly wrong on many counts, but relied on his own observations and testing and not on prevailing opinion.  His minute studies of anatomy (thanks to wholesale body-snatching and a ruinous collecting of animals) led him to the conclusion that life on earth evolves.  His study of fossils eroded away any idea that one forty day flood was responsible for the amount of life contained within.  His written work on this idea of the development of life was never published because a fellow scientist suggested he amend "thousands of centuries" to "thousands of years" because it might incite the rabble in those revolutionary times. 

His conservative methods were rejected by other surgeons, he died in debt, his brother-in-law published Hunter's work as his own and then burned the papers, but his legacy lived on through his museum and his students. 

He was not a pleasant man, but he was driven to understand and to share his knowledge, even if what he knew tomorrow was different from what he knew yesterday.  He was not so hidebound that he could not correct even his own conclusions.  A lesson for all of us.

Note: my copy had a different cover. I wish I'd had one with his portrait, so minutely described by the author but conspicuous by its absence in the book.



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And Don't Leave Out the Juicy Bits

The Man Who Loved China: Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece by Simon Winchester


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a review of the audiobook.
I'd read almost anything by Simon Winchester. You wouldn't think that a book about a man who WROTE a book ("a" book - ha ha) would be that interesting without, say, a parallel story about a fiendish murderer, but again Winchester takes what could be the driest story on earth and injects it with his usual enthusiasm, making it palatable to those who would doubt him. And I did doubt it would capture my interest, but I picked it up anyway because it was an audiobook read by the author.
And I loved it. Okay, I loved his reading.
Needham was a socialist, a biologist, a womanizer, a nudist, and an unrepentant Morris dancer. Consequently, he was a Renaissance man. His life-long passion for women led him to China which took him from biology to the study of the history of science and invention in China. Apparently, all we know about the Chinese firsts (abacus, wheelbarrow, kite, gunpowder, etc.) come to us courtesy of Needham. That later he was a dupe of Korean War propaganda was the only glitch in a stellar career. Oh, that and the Morris dancing.
[The author of this review holds no known hostility to Morris dancing, having never been subjected to it, and is merely parroting other sources in an attempt to be Humorous.:]

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