By For centuries the need for the surgeon to learn more of the anatomy of the human body and to practice his art has required students of medicine to examine and dissect the bodies of the dead – obtained legally or otherwise – in private schools or, from the mid-eighteenth century,
The Countess, the Gout and the Spider
Readers of our book Maladies and Medicine will be familiar with the fable of the gout and the spider (we have also blogged about it before). It was a fable which explained why the rich were thought to be more likely to suffer from gout than the poor. In 1713