The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack: How to Stay Alive in Renaissance England

Discover the remarkable birth of modern medicine... and how not to die in the Renaissance'An entertaining history of medicine… Skuse brings a deep familiarity with the contemporary sources and a dry wit.' Dan Jones, The Sunday Times'A richly researched and atmospheric history.' Wall Street JournalThe cliched view medicine in the Renaissance world is dreadful: gore-splattered hacksaws, arsenic concoctions, the four humours and all those leeches…Reality, however, proves somewhat different. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a medical revolution was afoot.Physicians’ education was being formalised. Surgeons were documenting the intricacies of the human body with ever-greater skill. And, as European powers expanded into the New World, novel medicines and treatments were being discovered. Alanna Skuse ventures into the bustling medical marketplace of Renaissance England - a world of travelling surgeons, prosthetics craftsmen, faith healers and snake oil merchants. Discover domestic