Volume 2 in McGee's series featuring Bow Street Runner Matthew Harwood takes a look at the seamy side of medical science in early nineteenth century London. The attempt to organize medical schools and regularize the training of doctors and surgeons, in some part brought about the by urgent demand for medical officers to treat those injured in the wars with Napoleon, is based on new scientific methods. But old fears and prejudices die hard, and in particular, dissection of human corpses to discover how the body works, is still considered a desecration of the dead by the church and the law and the general public. As a result, "Resurrection men" ply their trade in the dark, with dead bodies snatched from their graves and sold to medical schools and individual researchers, who don't ask questions about their sources of supply. The demand is so great, and the money so good, that rival gangs are fighting to control the trade.
Matthew Hawkwood is called out to investigate when the rivalry takes a grim turn. A grave robber is found murdered and his mutilated body hung from a tree in a churchyard as a warning to other gangs. The hunt for the killers takes Hawkwood into the worst slums of London, where life is cheap, the strong prey on the weak, and only the brutal survive. But even worse is in store, when Hawkwood connects the graveyard gangs to an even more bizarre murderer escaped from Bedlam, London's notorious asylum for the insane: a mad genius obsessed with the idea of harvestng organs from the dead to save lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment