The Casebooks | The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice

The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice is “a website dedicated to the horrors of pre-anaesthetic surgery”. Beautifully gruesome stories told byLindsey Fitzharris, a medical historian who is currently a Postdoc at Queen Mary, University of London.

Just to give you a taste:

On 8 October 1793, James Williams—a 16 year-old surgical student—described his living quarters in John Hunter’s anatomy school to his sister living in Worcester. He wrote:

My room has two beds in it and in point of situation is not the most pleasant in the world. The Dissecting Room with half a dozen dead bodies in it is immediately above and that in which Mr Hunter makes preparations is the next adjoining to it, so that you may conceive it to be a little perfumed. There is a dead carcase just at this moment rumbling up the stairs and the Resurrection Men swearing most terribly. I am informed this will be the case most mornings about four o’clock throughout the winter.

via @BoraZ