Pre Festival Event: The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack
In the run up to our Summer Festival, Clevedon Litfest and Books on the Hill are delighted to welcome Dr Alanna Skuse for a talk about her new book The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack: A How to Stay Alive in Renaissance England. Join us in person at Books on the Hill, or watch the free livestream.
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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
Livestream
This event will be available as a free livestream for those not attending in person. A link to watch the livestream will be added to this page shortly before the event, and reminders will go out on our social media channels.