"From the sixteenth-century saga of Andreas Vesalius and his crusade to accurately describe human anatomy while appeasing the clergy who clamored for his burning at the stake, to the story of late-nineteenth-century surgeons' apathy to Joseph Lister's innovation f antisepsis and how this indifference led to thousands of unnecessary surgical deaths, Empire of the Scalpel is both a history and a uniquely American tale. Readers will learn how the United States achieved surgical leadership in the twentieth century, heralded by Harvard's Joseph Murray and his Nobel Prize-winning, seemingly impossible feat of transplanting a kidney, which ushered in a new era of transplants that continues to make procedures once thought insurmountable into achievable successes."--
