Book Description

Today, astonishing surgical breakthroughs are making face transplants, limb transplants and a host of other cutting edge operations possible. But getting to this point has been an extraordinary story of courage and mistakes: stolen corpses, crazy remedies, medical fraud, lobotomised patients; and every now and then, brave and extraordinary advances that have saved millions of lives across the world. The brain, from misguided psychosurgery to pioneering neurosurgery, has taught us who we are. But the most complex organ in the body hides its secrets well, and surgeons have ended up travelling some dark roads on their extraordinary journey to map the human mind. With a family history of heart problems, presenter Michael Mosley takes a personal interest in these pioneers of heart surgery, who teeter on the scalpel-edge between saviour and executioner. He meets a man with no heartbeat, and witnesses an operation where the patient is cooled until their brain stops and has all of their blood sucked out. Transplant surgery seemed a craze, a one-off experiment. But pursuing fame, prestige and worldwide acclaim, surgeons took increasingly extraordinary risks. What lay ahead of them was a battle to tame the world's most sophisticated fighting machine: the body's immune system. Plastic surgery is not a modern phenomenon. It started over 400 years ago with a spate of botched nose jobs, so badly engineered that the nose would fall off if the wind blew too hard. It marked the birth of a whole new obsession; surgeons gradually became entranced with the idea that not only could they fix the body, but now they could even fix our sense of self-esteem.