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

The 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 healers like Elizabeth Freke, a doyenne of folk remedies, always ready to dole out tonics and elixirs to her ailing neighbours.
• Browse the shelves of the early modern apothecary with Nicholas Culpeper as he lays the groundwork for the modern pharmacy.
• Meet the expert midwife Jane Sharp, successful author and pioneer of women’s health.
• Join the intrepid plague doctor George Thomson as he braves London’s Great Plague.

Humane and entrancing, The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack reveals the people and stories behind a scientific revolution.

’Fascinating.’ Daily Mail

’Meticulously researched and deliciously detailed.’ Victoria Shepherd, author of A History of Delusions

Dr Alanna Skuse is a literary scholar, historian and author with a focus on stories about medicine, bodies, and Renaissance England. She teaches literature as Associate Professor at the University of Reading and has published academic books and articles on the history of cancer, surgery, disability, Shakespeare and self-harm. She also runs public history projects, and writes and broadcasts for BBC Radio, Wellcome Stories, the Conversation and History Today.