The Knife Man (2005)

John Hunter was the most famous surgeon in eighteenth-century London, and Moore does not let you forget where his anatomical knowledge came from. The dead of the city could end up on his dissecting table by way of body snatchers, and the lengths he went to for his research raised questions then and still do. That honesty is what makes it worth reading. You get the birth of surgery as an experimental science together with its cost to the poor and the dead, written with a journalist's pace and an eye for grotesque detail. It won the Medical Journalists' Open Book Award in 2005, and it sets up the world Lister would later transform.