I stumbled across this book by Audrey Blake by accident. I was looking for something else on OverDrive, when I saw this being promoted. Apparently it was part of a larger community reading thing where people were encouraged to read the book over the summer so we could all bond over a shared reading experience. As a result, I could get the ebook from OverDrive through July 27th without any holds or wait times, and the premise seemed interesting, so I went ahead and borrowed it.
I really enjoyed it. It’s about a young woman (early 20s) in late 19th century in London. Her name is Eleanor Beady, but everyone calls her Nora. Her family all died of cholera when she was eight years old. She also got cholera, but survived, and since she had no family left, she ended up staying with the doctor who treated her, Dr. Horace Croft.
Croft is your stereotypical doctor in that he’s obsessed with learning about the human body and disease and the best ways to put people back together again. He cares very little for anything else, including silly social conventions or laws that bar perfectly capable women from practicing medicine.
Admittedly, keeping Nora as his ward/apprentice started more as an experiment than anything he did out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted to see if she would be immune to cholera the next time it swept through London. It was his housekeeper, Mrs. Phipps, who insisted they keep the girl.
Nora knew nothing of their conversation concerning her, and remained in fear for a while that Dr. Croft would throw her out on the street, so she determined to make herself useful. She would dust and clean, and then one day she started drawing sketches of Dr. Croft’s skeletons and other medical curiosities, which eventually led to her doing sketches of his surgeries and amputations. Apparently she was good enough at it for her drawings to be published alongside his reports. Eventually, she also transcribed his notes since he has the stereotypical doctor’s handwriting.
By the time Nora is in her early 20s, she’s running Dr. Croft’s clinic and has helped diagnose and treat his patients with a variety of ailments, since doctors at this time were a kind of jack-of-all-trades.
Dr. Croft is getting older and his medical practice is still growing, so he takes on another assistant, Dr. Daniel Gibson, but neglects to tell Daniel about Nora before hiring him. Nora is, of course, peeved that Dr. Croft didn’t think to mention her work to Daniel before bringing him on board, since that means she has to hide her work whenever Daniel is around. Dr. Croft is convinced Daniel will be open minded, but admits it is best for Nora to stick to running the clinic instead of actually treating patients for a while.
Of course Daniel finds out by accident. In addition to working in the same place, they all live in the same house, so how could he not find out? He’s horrified at first, but never really seems to contemplate turning Nora in … less out of goodwill than out of a fear that he would be found guilty as an accomplice.
Daniel and Nora start out hating each other, but you can tell they’re going to fall in love, and of course they do.
One night a patient comes in with a hernia, and Dr. Croft is out of town, so Daniel and Nora are the only two who can treat him.
I had no idea that, at this point in time, hernias were untreatable. If they weren’t too severe, your doctor might just push it back in, but that was about the best you could hope for. By the time this guy got to the clinic, it’s way too late for that. Their only hope is to operate, even though, as a general rule, no one operates on the abdomen because one wrong cut could open up the digestive tract and infect the whole abdomen. Also, anesthesia wasn’t really a thing, so knocking out a patient during surgery was not an option, and abdominal surgery is painful enough that patients tend to jerk, even when restrained, thereby increasing the chances of a cut in the wrong place.
Fortunately, Dr. Croft and his team have been experimenting with sulfuric ether as a way to knock out their patients and save them from pain, so they use it on their hapless patient and operate on his hernia. Nora had read about a single successful hernia operation, but there was just the one, and it was over a century ago, and it was on a cadaver rather than a living person, so suffice to say there’s no guarantee this will work on a live patient. On the other hand, if they don’t operate, he’ll die for sure, so they really have nothing to lose here.
At first, the section of intestine appears to be so deprived of oxygen as to have died, meaning it needs to be cut out if the patient is to live. But again, there’s no good way for them to do that while ensuring they don’t infect the entire abdomen.
Fortunately, Nora happens to feel a pulse as she’s holding the bit of intestine and waits for color to reappear, and sure enough, it does. They’re able to tuck the intestine back in place, sew up his abdominal wall, and finally his skin. Then they just have to wait and see if he survives the next few days, which he does.
The surgery is worthy of publication, but of course they can’t publish it under Nora’s name. So they decide to publish it under Daniel’s name, listing Nora’s initials as an aide during the surgery. But it’s a two-person surgery, so they get one of Daniel’s friends to say he did the surgery with him, even though he wasn’t even in the building.
Their report of the surgery gets challenged by Dr. Croft’s nemesis, and chaos ensues when the witness doesn’t cooperate as he initially said he would.
This book was hard to put down, even when I could see what was coming next. I can only imagine how much research the author must have done, even just to describe certain medical conditions and the relevant anatomy. I was riveted, and I will definitely be reading more by this author.