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.

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