The Mesmerist: The Society Doctor Who Held Victorian London Spellbound
Wendy Moore
Apr 2017 · Weidenfeld & Nicolson · Narrated by Piers Hampton
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12 hr 41 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Medicine, in the early 1800s, was a brutal business. Operations were performed without anaesthesia while conventional treatment relied on leeches, cupping and toxic potions. The most surgeons could offer by way of pain relief was a large swig of brandy.
Into this scene came John Elliotson, the dazzling new hope of the medical world. Charismatic and ambitious, Elliotson was determined to transform medicine from a hodge-podge of archaic remedies into a practice informed by the latest science. In this aim he was backed by Thomas Wakley, founder of the new magazine, the Lancet, and a campaigner against corruption and malpractice.
Then, in the summer of 1837, a French visitor - the self-styled Baron Jules Denis Dupotet - arrived in London to promote an exotic new idea: mesmerism. The mesmerism mania would take the nation by storm but would ultimately split the two friends, and the medical world, asunder - throwing into focus fundamental questions about the fine line between medicine and quackery, between science and superstition.
Read by Piers Hampton
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group
Into this scene came John Elliotson, the dazzling new hope of the medical world. Charismatic and ambitious, Elliotson was determined to transform medicine from a hodge-podge of archaic remedies into a practice informed by the latest science. In this aim he was backed by Thomas Wakley, founder of the new magazine, the Lancet, and a campaigner against corruption and malpractice.
Then, in the summer of 1837, a French visitor - the self-styled Baron Jules Denis Dupotet - arrived in London to promote an exotic new idea: mesmerism. The mesmerism mania would take the nation by storm but would ultimately split the two friends, and the medical world, asunder - throwing into focus fundamental questions about the fine line between medicine and quackery, between science and superstition.
Read by Piers Hampton
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group
About the author
Wendy Moore is a freelance journalist and author. Her first book, THE KNIFE MAN, won the Medical Journalists' Association Consumer Book Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for both Saltire and the Marsh Biography Awards. Her second book, WEDLOCK, has been highly acclaimed in reviews and was chosen as one of the ten titles in the Channel 4 TV Book Club. HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WIFE was published to rapturous reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.
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