Imagine coming home from work without a couple of fingers because you didn't take your hand from under the saw quickly enough. Or lying in your hospital bed without a testicle because the surgeon made a "small" mistake during your leg amputation. Awkward.

The story of 19th-century surgery told in parallel with the professional and personal life of Joseph Lister is predictably gruesome but also fascinating. The hygiene practices of today weren't even a thought in most surgeons' minds, and Lister was ridiculed when he published his ideas. With his persistent experimentation and persuasion of other surgeons (who, in the first decades of the 1800s, progressed from uneducated and sometimes illiterate technicians to modern specialists), he proved that reducing infection and death rates was possible by using carbolic acid as an antiseptic.

I was already following Fitzharris on Instagram, and last January, I finally got around to reading her book. It was just as good as I expected, and then some. Although medicine isn't a familiar field to me, Fitzharris's debut is a meticulously researched pageturner. I definitely need a paper copy of this and her second book about the beginnings of plastic surgery.