The medical historian is obsessed with mortality – and her new book examines the work of early surgeons, including Robert Liston, the ‘fastest knife in the West End’
The first time Lindsey Fitzharris saw a dead body, she was eight years old. Her great-aunt was embalmed and on display, a common practice at funerals in the American midwest. “My cousin asked me if I wanted to touch her; I was a kid, of course I did,” she says.
Almost 30 years after she brushed her aunt’s cold, slightly too-firm arm, Fitzharris still remembers the instantaneous change that came from that gentle contact; a new perception of mortality revealed to her, like someone turning on a light. “It was one of those moments where you realise something has fundamentally changed with this body. That person is gone. I touched her and I understood then, that death meant something much bigger than I had previously thought.”
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