Publisher's Synopsis
'This is history with a surgeon's touch: deft, incisive and sometimes excruciatingly bloody' The Sunday Times
'Utterly eccentric and riveting' Mail on Sunday
'Eye-opening and, frequently, eye-watering . . . a book that invites readers to peer up the bottoms of kings, into the souls of rock stars and down the ear canals of astronauts' Daily Telegraph
How did a decision made in the operating theatre spark hundreds of conspiracy theories about JFK?
How did a backstage joke prove fatal to world-famous escape artist Harry Houdini?
How did Queen Victoria change the course of surgical history?
Through dark centuries of bloodletting and of amputations without anaesthetic to today's sterile, high-tech operating theatres, surgeon Arnold van de Laar uses his experience and expertise to tell an incisive history of the past, present and future of surgery.
