I'm not a fan of biographies and I have a weak stomach, so I never would have picked this book up if it wasn't for my new book club. As it turns out, the graphic details of 18th century surgery didn't bother me nearly as much as I expected (which may be due in some part to having watched two and a half seasons of House over the last twelve months).

Anyway, The Knife Man is a biography of John Hunter, the influential and groundbreaking British surgeon. It details his rise from assisting with dissections at his brother's anatomy school to being a celebrated champion of scientific medicine. Along the way, there are softball-sized bladder stones, torn achilles tendons, grave robberies, tooth transplants, gunshot wounds, and more. I was surprised and sometimes fascinated to learn about particular medical tidbits that were (and weren't) known in the 18th century.

But ultimately, I plodded through many sections of the book. In places, it's pretty dull and sometimes it's downright repetitive.