The butchering art (2017)

Victorian operating theaters were known as "gateways of death," and Fitzharris puts you in the gallery to see why. Her subject is Joseph Lister, who argued that germs were the source of infection and could be fought with antiseptics, and who turned surgery from a brutal ordeal into a safer profession. It is the most purely readable book here, close to a thriller in pace, but the patients are never just props: you feel what an operation in a filthy ward meant for the person on the table, even once anesthesia had arrived. It won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing. Squeamish readers should know the opening chapters do not hold back.