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Book Review: Digging up the Dead. Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon

Astley Cooper was 16 when he left home, near Norwich, for London in 1784 to be apprenticed to his uncle William, a senior surgeon at Guy’s. He had little schooling and a reputation as a dare-devil; in London he wasted a year as a man-about-town. The epiphany came when Henry Cline, the Guy’s surgeon with whom he lodged (and whose house he later acquired), brought home a human arm and challenged him to dissect it. From then on ‘anatomising was his passion’, aided by a plentiful supply of bodies from the resurrection men, hence the title of Druin Burch’s biography. A handsome man, always fashionably dressed, Cooper was blessed with boundless energy and a boisterous sense of humour. Soon he was treating the sick poor of the Borough, operating and doing ward rounds that were popular with the students, and developing a series of lucrative private lectures. At the age of 32 he became a senior surgeon at Guy’s and private practice flourished until he was earning more than any other doctor in London but he never gave up research and kept a menagerie for experiments on animals in a warehouse next to his house. He was made a Baronet by George IV and appointed Sergeant-Surgeon; he carried out an autopsy when the King died in 1830. He then became sergeant-surgeon to William IV and attended him in his last illness, after which he was summoned to embalm the body. He, himself, died of heart failure in 1841 and was buried in the vaults of Guy’s. Druin Burch, a young hospital doctor, came to Astley Cooper through reading about Keats. His widely researched account, readily accessible to the layperson, encompasses not just the intriguing surgical scene but the fraught political climate of the time and relevant asides based on his own practice. A remarkable debut.