NPR

No One's Hands Are Clean In 'The Butchering Art'

Lindsey Fitzharris' new book about the horrors of Victorian medicine and the introduction of antisepsis is a vital, effective history — but perhaps you shouldn't read it with a full stomach.
"The Butchering Art" by Lindsey Fitzharris

To read The Butchering Art, you should have a stronger stomach than mine.

The book makes no bones (pun unfortunately intended) about what you'll find inside — it's subtitled , so you're duly forewarned. And I thought I knew more or less what I was in for. I knew about the disgusting sanitary conditions in 19th-century hospitals; I knew about the much-too-slow development of

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