Review: The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

Arrrrrrgh, this book. This book, this book, this book. I've been putting off reviewing it for ages because my notes are a garbled mess of exclamation points, page numbers and quotes, and every time I think about this book my heart (and head) hurt all over again. It's a brilliant, brilliant book and, even if you can't make it to the end of this mess of a review, I really encourage you to read it.

Summary: 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous – the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls.

As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses. The very thing that had made them feel alive – their work – was in fact slowly killing them: they had been poisoned by the radium paint. Yet their employers denied all responsibility. And so, in the face of unimaginable suffering – in the face of death – these courageous women refused to accept their fate quietly, and instead became determined to fight for justice.

Drawing on previously unpublished sources – including diaries, letters and court transcripts, as well as original interviews with the women’s relatives – The Radium Girls is an intimate narrative account of an unforgettable true story. It is the powerful tale of a group of ordinary women from the Roaring Twenties, who themselves learned how to roar.

This is technically a non-fiction work about the women who earned a living by painting luminescent dials on watches in the 1920s. I say 'technically,' because I have never cried this much over a non-fiction book (or any fiction book either, in fairness). The tone is a rarely-seen perfect mix of the emotional and the technical - although every single page contains near constant quotes from the women and their families, the remaining text tells the women's story with a very sympathetic narrative.

That's not a criticism. I never felt like I was being emotionally manipulated and it would be very, very difficult to write a book of this nature and be objective. Aside from the original horror of the women being told to put radium in their mouths in the first place, they were lied to nigh-on continuously by the company and even so-called medical experts. Their bodies collapsed, their hearts broke and their bank accounts emptied, but the company continued to Appeal, even after the Courts had already made a decision.

The tone of the text is light and very accessible, but the subject is not. Their jaw bones literally fell out of their mouths. There are photographs in the middle of the book - most are included to emphasise that these women were real, human, living people (temporarily, at any rate) but there are a few that show the size of tumours, disintegrated bones, etc. There is one particular photo that I kept turning back to and I cried every single time I looked at it. One of the women collapsed during a Court hearing after she was told that her condition was fatal (her well-intentioned doctors had decided to keep this information from her) and a photographer somehow got a shot mid-collapse. It really demonstrates the lack of knowledge provided to these women and their emotional state at that time.

There aren't words to describe how much these women suffered. It's not just the physical horrors, but the way they were treated. One woman was posthumously slapped with a 'syphilis' label even though there was no indication of any sexually transmitted disease and another woman's body was pretty much stolen from the hospital by the organisation before the family could pay their respects. They were shunned by their communities for creating trouble for the factories that provided jobs for local people and some of the women's husbands became jealous of their (later) wealth and threatened to gas them.

I cried on a train, I cried on a bus and I cried in a cafe. This was real, this happened and people did nothing. My eyes are watering with angry tears as I write this six weeks after I read it.

It's very hard to separate the topic from the book, but I'm going to try because I don't think Kate Moore's skill deserves to be overshadowed by the tragedy she writes about. She writes very well - to say that a good 300 pages of The Radium Girls is about a legal battle, it flows, it's interesting and it's engrossing. She has clearly put a tremendous amount of effort into research and interviewing the relatives of the deceased, and she appears to genuinely care about the plight suffered of the radium girls. 

And Grace Fryer was never forgotten. She is still remembered now – you are still remembering her now. As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story.

Please read this book. Firstly, it's important that we acknowledge these brave and strong individuals who were so profoundly abused in so many different ways. Their bodies and their fight went on to form the basis of ground-breaking legislation that is still in place in the US today, and allowed for progress to be made with preventing radiation toxicity in others. They were ignored and shunned when they were alive, and that was not acceptable. At least now we can look back and retrospectively apologise.

Secondly, I'm desperate to talk about this book so hurry up and read it! I want to talk about the women, the people and especially how radium affected the whole town. The factory was eventually used as a meat locker - so naturally everybody who ate the meat became severely ill. After that the factory was knocked down... and the rubble was deposited around town. Dogs died prematurely, citizens developed an inordinate amount of tumours... you get the idea. I want to talk about it. 

Lastly, it's just a brilliant, brilliant book. Kate Moore is a wonderful writer who has tackled an extremely difficult subject with dignity and grace. Every second that I wasn't reading this book, I wanted to be. It's riveting and completely engrossing.

So there, you go. Read The Radium Girls because it's important, discussion-provoking and enjoyable.
  

Read Ellie's review of The Radium Girls at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm. 

Review: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematorium by Caitlin Doughty

I'm a sucker for the morbid. Whilst I like medical and mental health related non-fiction, I have a guilty pleasure for the more macabre books. I find how people have dealt with death throughout history fascinating, particularly the associated rituals and beliefs, but also how the body naturally reacts to death in a physiological sense. See Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found and also Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.

I was blown away by Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - not only is it a much deeper and wider examination of death practices than expected, it's actually written very, very well.

Summary/synopsis: From her first day at Westwind Cremation & Burial, twenty-three-year-old Caitlin Doughty threw herself into her curious new profession. Coming face-to-face with the very thing we go to great lengths to avoid thinking about she started to wonder about the lives of those she cremated and the mourning families they left behind, and found herself confounded by people's erratic reactions to death. Exploring our death rituals - and those of other cultures - she pleads the case for healthier attitudes around death and dying. Full of bizarre encounters, gallows humour and vivid characters (both living and very dead), this illuminating account makes this otherwise terrifying subject inviting and fascinating. 

Caitlin Doughty is apparently relatively famous in the field of, I don't know, death people? She's most renowned for her YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician, as well as founding The Order of the Good Death, which promotes a more natural acceptance of death. Before all this, however, she started out at Westwind Cremation and Burial as a crematorium operator, responsible for moving soon-to-be-cremated bodies into the incinerator and all the associated tasks, of which there are a surprising amount. The anecdotes she recounts are somehow both hilarious and mildly disgusting, and at certain points I definitely laughed out loud.

This is not a book for those of a sensitive disposition. We read about decay, leaking and mechanisms for keeping the eyes of the deceased firmly closed (spoiler alert: they use caps with spikes on). I like that about this book though. I like that it goes slightly beyond the realms of propriety to explain the details that I had never considered were an issue. For me, the most interesting chapter dealt with the bodies of babies, both pre- and post-term, and the associated problems. It wasn't exactly pleasant reading, but it was fascinating and I have respect for the author for discussing what most people would rather brush under the carpet.

Caitlin Doughty speaks with respect and humanity throughout. Although her book made me laugh out loud at points, the book never makes fun of the deceased or their families, and it appears that the corpses were treated with respect at the material time as well. Mishaps happen, of course, but not through any carelessness or lack of compassion.

This humanity underlies the 'agenda' of this book and the issues that Caitlin Doughty currently works to highlight. She writes that there is a culture of death denial prevalent in the modern world. Where death was previously accepted as a natural fact of life, attempts are now made to hide ourselves away from the very existence of death, as evidenced by the multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry, the rise of embalming and the ability to cremate your loved ones via the Internet.  

She supports family members preparing their own deceased for burial, as decomposition and decay are inherently natural and cannot harm us. By being afraid of the sight of death, we are denying what is an absolute fact of life.

Less than a year after donning my corpse-coloured glasses, I went from thinking it was strange that we don't see dead bodies any more to believing their absence was a root cause of major problems in the modern world.

Corpses keep the living thethered to reality. I had lived my entire life up until I began working at Westwind relatively corpse-free. Now I had access to scores of them - stacked in the crematorium freezer. They forced me to face my own death and the deaths of those i loved. No matter how human technology may become our master, it takes only a human corpse to toss the anchor off that boat and pull us back down to the firm knowledge that we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses.

Whilst I can't say that I enjoyed the latter chapters as much as the former sections where the author discussed her day-to-day life as a crematorium operator, this book really made me think and I can't get these issues out of my head. Whilst I found a few of her ideas a little too out-there for me, like her desire for her corpse to be left in the open to be devoured by nature, I feel that this surely proves her entire point. The concept shouldn't make me uncomfortable and it's not 'out-there' at all - after all, it's entirely natural and it's only very recently that such endeavours stopped being the norm. It's a lot to think about.  

I really, really recommend reading Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Even the prose is written to a much higher standard than one would usually expect for a memoir-style work of this nature. It doesn't try too hard to be pithy, nor does the author come across as preachy or naive. I was disappointed when this book ended and I will happily and enthusiastically read anything Caitlin Doughty ever writes.

Visit Caitlin Doughty's YouTube channel or read more about The Order of the Good Death. Alternatively, find her on Twitter here.

Review: Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine by Dr Paul Offit

Whilst I'd be the first to say that I've read a lot of great non-fiction this year, Bad Faith was my absolute, undoubted favourite (and I've only gotten round to writing a review because I'll need to add it to my Top Ten Books of 2016 list shortly). I read quite a lot of medical non-fiction due to my career, but I'd never read one that was as accessible, well-written and thought-provoking as this one.

Summary: In recent years, there have been major outbreaks of whooping cough among children in California, mumps in New York, and measles in Ohio’s Amish country—despite the fact that these are all vaccine-preventable diseases. Although America is the most medically advanced place in the world, many people disregard modern medicine in favor of using their faith to fight life threatening illnesses. Christian Scientists pray for healing instead of going to the doctor, Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood transfusions, and ultra-Orthodox Jewish mohels spread herpes by using a primitive ritual to clean the wound. Tragically, children suffer and die every year from treatable diseases, and in most states it is legal for parents to deny their children care for religious reasons. In twenty-first century America, how could this be happening?

In Bad Faith, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Paul Offit gives readers a never-before-seen look into the minds of those who choose to medically martyr themselves, or their children, in the name of religion. Offit chronicles the stories of these faithful and their children, whose devastating experiences highlight the tangled relationship between religion and medicine in America. Religious or not, this issue reaches everyone—whether you are seeking treatment at a Catholic hospital or trying to keep your kids safe from diseases spread by their unvaccinated peers.

I'm not going to discuss the content of this book. Anybody who knows me even vaguely will know what side of the fence I fall on and hundreds of people (Dr Offit included) have explained their views far more eloquently than I ever could. Yes, Hanna is keeping her mouth shut for once.

This book contains a variety of topics from a close examination of Christian Science (which believes that illness is an illusion caused by ignorance of God - therefore, as illness is not actually real, the only way to treat it is prayer), televangelists, child abuse, abortion, etc. It's a well-balanced book with case studies, excerpts from the Bible and also scientific studies, which results in a discussion, not a rant.

What impressed me the most was the balanced nature of Bad Faith. Dr Offit is a Pediatrician specialising in infectious diseases and is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. It's fairly safe to say that his sympathies are going to lie with science and medicine, and so I was more or less expecting a diatribe on the dangers of religion and how their beliefs are ineffectual and redundant. As it turns out, I completely misjudged both Dr Offit and his work. Several chapters discuss how much good religion has brought about with regard to healing and how their efforts can be misintepreted by the more cynical. It's only the (usually) well-intentioned few who are the cause of the controversy.

Faith healing parents often argue that they were only doing what Jesus would have done. But what would He have done? - this man who dedicated his life to relieving the illness, poverty, and death around him; who wept at the suffering of children; who stood up for those who couldn't stand up for themselves. One can only imagine Jesus would have used whatever was available to prevent that suffering, much as Christians have been doing in His name for centuries.

What I loved about this book is that I still can't tell if Dr Offit believes in God or not. He never once suggests that God does not exist and, to an extent, I don't suppose it really matters in this context. It's more about the ways in which the fervent, zealous beliefs of a few (not of religion as a whole) have affected the treatment of many.

Several case studies are discussed in depth (including the Texas measles outbreak and the case of Matthew Swan that led to the large-scale investigation of faith healing) and Dr Offit references a huge amount of papers and studies to back up his opinions. Whilst this is definitely a popular-interest book, its based on thorough research and investigation.

I think I would have preferred a little more discussion on abortion, euthanasia, vaccination (although I understand he has a whole book dedicated to vaccination, so perhaps he didn't wish to repeat himself), etc, instead of the slight repetition with regard to faith healing, on which Bad Faith mainly dwells. My favourite section was (unsurprisingly) the part about the statutes which make it so difficult to prosecute faith healing parents.

Bad Faith is heart-breaking and shocking. I finished this book whilst getting a train to York to see a show, and I couldn't get it out of my head during the train ride or the show itself. Sorry, Alan Cumming. Some aspects hurt me, some angered me and others just caused bewilderment at how anybody could think that was acceptable.

This is a compassionate yet logical discussion of how a misunderstanding of certain religious tenets can lead to severe harm, despite the multitude of scientific advances. Dr Offit has written several other books which I'm looking forward to reading, including Killing Us Softly: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine, which I've totally already bought.

I recomend reading Dr Offit's article in the New York Times - What Would Jesus Do About Measles?  - or listen to an interview with him about this book here.

Review: Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

Last year I read and reviewed Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, and immediatley ran out and purchased everything else that Atul Gawande had ever written. See, we say things like that a lot in our little book blogging world, but in this case that is genuinely and literally exactly what I did. These books are perfect in a lot of different ways and I really recommend them to everybody, whether they have a medical background or not.

Summary: In this unflinching look at medicine today, gifted surgeon and bestselling author Atul Gawande visits battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, a polio outbreak in India and malpractice courtrooms. He charts the race to extend cystic fibrosis patients' lives and discusses the ethical implications of doctors' participation in lethal injections in the United States. Examining everything from the influence of money on modern medicines to the contentious history of hand washing, this book provides a rare insight into what it takes to go from good to better.

The key thing to know about this book is that it's not about how doctors can make their patients better, it's about the ways they can improve to make their own practice and treatment regime better. That said, it's far from a manual aimed at lecturing hospital staff, it's an accessible and engaging collection of thoughts that I would say is aimed at the general public.

Mr Gawande has divided his book into three sections - Diligence, Doing Right and Ingenuity - which he says are the three core requirements for success in medicine, or any endeavour that involves risk and responsibility.

Diligence was perhaps my favourite of the three sections as it focuses more on doctors as people, and the tiny little everyday responsibilities that I find fascinating. It looks at how, despite the movement started in the 1840s to encourage doctors to wash their hands, a surprisingly large amount of them still forget when running from patient to patient. We also examine the huge-scale campaigns to eradicate polio and the effort required to vaccinate every single child in India, and the brave doctors who accompany the military to Iraq, Afghanistan and every other campaign across the globe.

Doing Right looks at the obligations that doctors and other medical professionals are under, and whether they are always strictly fair. For example, there's a chapter on whether it should be obligatory for a doctor to attend during a state execution or whether this directly contravenes their purpose, which is to heal people. I also really enjoyed the chapter about how doctors examine the more intimate areas of a person's body and whether a chaperone should be required.

Lastly, we look at Ingenuity, which covers the introduction of the Apgar score (which assesses the health of a newborn baby) as well as looking at how medical centers and hospitals and can improve by comparing the statistics of other, similar centers.

“It is unsettling to find how little it takes to defeat success in medicine. You come as a professional equipped with expertise and technology. You do not imagine that a mere matter of etiquette could foil you. But the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific--matters of how casual you should be, how formal, how reticent, how forthright. Also: how apologetic, how self-confident, how money-minded. In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating. How each interaction is negotiated can determine whether a doctor is trusted, whether a patient is heard, whether the right diagnosis is made, the right treatment given. But in this realm there are no perfect formulas.”

However, the topics almost fall into irrelevance when compared to Mr Gawande's prose. He writes with such humanity and grace that you'd be forgiven for thinking he was an author by trade, not a surgeon. I was also impressed by his seeming complete lack of bias. There's a chapter on medical malpractice lawsuits which was angering me more and more as I read on (as a disclaimer, I defend doctors from lawsuits for a living!) but he maintains a perfect tone throughout that accepts that doctors are people too. Mistakes are made, some are unavoidable whilst some are not, but perhaps patients do deserve some compensation when an avoidable mistake is made.

I'm unsure which of the two books, Complications or Better, I prefer. The topics are slightly different but naturally there is some overlap. Complications focuses more on surgical procedures but therefore involves more case studies, which doesn't really interest me because I do nothing but nosy at other people's illnesses at work. I can see how that might interest people not quite as pompous as myself, however.

Better doesn't feature any case studies and the sections on execution chambers and eradicating polio (amongst others) were fascinating. However, there are a few chapters on the cost of treatments, statistics and medical hierarchy that just weren't applicable to countries other than America. I ended up skipping the section on funding because it made so little sense to me. It's written just as well as the remainder of the book, but it just didn't appeal to me as a UK resident.   

To solve the comparison problem, I'd honestly just read both of them. And also Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End. I haven't read it yet, but I don't see it being anything less than amazing if his previous books are anything to go by. My one complaint about these series is that the silver leaf around the edges of the book does tend to rub off, which looks quite scruffy 280 pages later.

Read my review of Complications here. And then go read both these books!

Review: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande

Oh how I loved this book. It might be because I was just relieved to read something, anything, that wasn't Armada, but I don't think that would be doing Atul Gawande justice. This book is beautifully written, occasionally heart-warming and so much more than one of those generic 'horrific tales from A&E' memoirs. 

Summary: Gently dismantling the myth of medical infallibility, Dr. Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is essential reading for anyone involved in medicine--on either end of the stethoscope. Medical professionals make mistakes, learn on the job, and improvise much of their technique and self-confidence. Gawande's tales are humane and passionate reminders that doctors are people, too. His prose is thoughtful and deeply engaging, shifting from sometimes painful stories of suffering patients (including his own child) to intriguing suggestions for improving medicine with the same care he expresses in the surgical theater. Some of his ideas will make health care providers nervous or even angry, but his disarming style, confessional tone, and thoughtful arguments should win over most readers.

I should begin by saying that this relates directly to my day job - I advise and defend Doctors and other health professionals who are the subject of legal claims due to an alleged negligence. I've worked on neurosurgery, retained objects and delayed diagnosis claims, amongst others, so this book has a certain amount of interest for me.

Complications is far from merely a collection of anecdotes about 'when things go wrong,' however, and I do think it would interest everybody. Instead, Dr Gawande examines the concepts of surgery itself and discusses the different theories behind why things go wrong and the difficulty of actually implementing improvements. It's absolutely fascinating.

Two things really got me about this book - 1) the beauty of the writing, and 2) the humanity behind it. I propose to deal with them in turn, if I may. The prose in Complications is amazing though. He doesn't just write well 'for a surgeon,' Atul Gawande has a style that any author would be proud of. I've seen how surgeons write, and usually you're lucky if they've managed to spell the patient's name correctly. Mr Gawande is eloquent, articulate and patient as he guides us through the unforeseen conundrums of what surgery actually entails.

However, he doesn't beat the reader over their head with his qualifications. Obviously he references his job fairly often, as well as anecdotes that have come from his colleagues. What impressed me though, is that he also refers to his personal life and isn't above admitting fallibility when it comes to personal, medical decisions. There's a chapter that discusses the need to train new surgeons v providing the best possible care for patients. Trainees need to 'practice,' but who really wants an inexperienced student cutting into them? Mr Gawande refers to his own experience, in which he was asked whether he minded a surgical trainee performing his son's operation. Despite all his logic to the contrary, he refused. 

This is the uncomfortable truth about teaching. By traditional ethics and public insistence (not to mention court rulings), a patient's right to the best care possible must trump the objective of training novices. We want perfection without practice. Yet everyone is harmed if no one is trained for the future. So learning is hidden, behind drapes and anaesthesia and the elisions of language. Nor does the dilemma apply just to residents, physicians in training. In fact, the process of learning turns out to extend longer than most people know.

The book is divided into three parts, called Fallibility, Mystery and Uncertainty. The first section deals with the topics I've touched on - the best way to train surgeons, when/why good doctors go bad, the lessons learned from surgical conferences, etc. 

The second part, Mystery, was my least favourite, although still interesting. Essentially it discusses three cases and the conceptual issues that arose from those particular matters. There's a TV presenter that undergoes surgery to control her chronic blushing, for example, and Mr Gawande touches on the judgement she's since received since her surgery was performed. They're interesting, but I personally preferred the more abstract chapters.

The Uncertainty chapters swing back into the discussion, dealing with topics like the inevitable requirement to take chances when performing surgery, the extent to which patients should be given control over their own care and whether human instinct or computers are better at providing accurate diagnoses.

Complications is perfectly accessible for a layperson. Every term and every abbreviation is seamlessly explained within the text, without the need to flick back to a glossary or consult a footnote. There are only one or two places that the mildly squeamish may balk at, but you can see them coming so it would be easy to gloss over them if necessary.

I hadn't realised that this was published way back in 2002 - it's just recently been rereleased in a pretty cover to match his other, newer books, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance and Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End. Still, as the focus is on conceptual discussion more than particular treatments, I wouldn't think Complications is horrendously out of date. I just know I'm already desperate to read his other books. This one is perfect.'

Visit Mr Gawande's website here.    

Review: Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson

This is the book I bought on Christmas Eve and read over the festive period - a non-fiction book about severed heads. What screams 'CHRISTMAS!' more than learning how to remove decaying flesh from a skull for display purposes?

Summary: The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and it connects our inner selves to the outer world more intensely than any other part of the body. Yet there is a dark side to the head's pre-eminence, one that has, in the course of Western history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting. Over the centuries, human heads have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums. Long-regarded as objects of fascination and repulsion, they have been props for portrait artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. 

From the western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred brutal massacres, to the Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of Japanese opponents home to their girlfriends; from the memento mori in Romantic portraits to Damien Hirst's platinum skull set with diamonds; from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, fantastical and confounding history of the severed head, and offers us a new perspective on our macabre preoccupations.

Severed has eight chapters (discounting the introduction and conclusion) all named after a different type of head. These include:

Shrunken Heads

Trophy Heads

Deposed Heads

Framed Heads

Potent Heads

Bone Heads

Dissected Heads

Living Heads

It's easy to guess the topic of some of these 'head'ings (HA), but not so much for others. We'll go through them anyway, as there is a little disparity in quality between the different chapters.

Shrunken Heads interested me an awful lot more than I expected it to. I suppose it's one of those topics that you think you know all about, but actually don't in the slightest. The author works from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which is famous for its selection of shrunken heads, so she's more than familiar with the concept. This chapter touches on the reasons for creating the heads in the first place (and whatever you're thinking, you're wrong), the process and the effects of Western influence.

I'd also expected to have to skim the second chapter, Trophy Heads, which is about heads (or parts thereof) being taken home from war as, you guessed it, trophies. Honestly, war doesn't interest me all that much - or not 20th Century warfare, anyway. This... this was actually fascinating, however. It discusses how (for example) during the Pacific War, American troops were so thoroughly brainwashed to believe that the Japanese soldiers weren't actually people, that they thought nothing of cleaning a newly-killed enemy's skull and sending it home to the family.

Deposed Heads was the chapter I was looking forward to the most, although I admit that I'd expected it to be longer. While the information contained is very interesting, I was hoping for more content on the history and examples of execution. It's the first thing that comes to mind when you think 'severed head,' after all. If I'm honest, it is pretty much the reason I bought it and it felt a little lacking.

The fourth chapter, Framed Heads, bored me a little and I ended up skimming parts of it. Call me a philistine, but I'm just not that interested in Attention Art. I don't care if somebody thought it was a good idea to freeze their blood and sculpt their head out of it - I don't want to look at it, but it doesn't bother me either. Complete apathy. My lack of interest isn't the fault of the book, however - it's written just as accessibly as the rest of it... but eh. Not my thing.

Unfortunately it does start to go a little downhill from here - Potent, Bone and Dissected Heads are remarkably similar and often repeat the same information. I swear I'm a bone (HA - ah, this is fun) a fide expert on the various ways to remove flesh from a skull by now. I'm also very, very aware that corpses used for dissections were almost always from the prison/workhouse and that there was a difficulty in getting hold of non-Anglo corpses. I know. I do. Please stop.

I understand that there are only so many different types of heads to discuss, but I do feel the information could have been separated slightly better to avoid unecessary repetition.

Thankfully, it does pick back up with the final chapter, Living Heads, which is mostly dedicated to cryogenics and other methods of keeping severed heads alive. I now know exactly how much it will cost, should I ever decide I want to be frozen for the indefinite future.

Whatever the specific circumstances, usually the people who take heads see themselves as inherently different from the people whose heads they take. They objectify their target to a certain extent. It is easy to see how cutting off a person's head transforms that person into a particularly potent kind of object - but frequently that process has already begun before the first cut is made.

The book is written very accessibly, which isn't easy considering the amount of medical terminology involved. It has a light, chatty tone that still manages to imbue an aura of authority throughout - it's not a dusty textbook, but Frances Larson still sounds like she knows what she's talking about. I'm definitely impressed with the balanced way it was written.

I really enjoyed Severed, on the whole. I think I was expecting more of a historical work, when it's actually more medical/anthropological. There's a lot more time spent on native tribes and surgical examinations than on the history of the guillotine, for example. Which is absolutely fine, but I think I was swayed by the word 'history' on the cover and the images of Anne Boleyn. It's still absorbing, but not as relevant to my interests as I had expected.     

Visit Frances Larson's website here or find her on Twitter.