Lindsey Fitzharris Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Lindsey Fitzharris is a published American author and a medical historian.

She was born in 1982. Lindsey is not only an author and a medical historian, but a television host too. She hosts and writes the television series “The Curious Life and Death of…” which started airing on the Smithsonian Channel in 2020. The show involves her using various tests, science and demonstrations to create new insights into famed murders, suicides, and diseases. She collaborates with eyewitnesses and experts to get to the bottom of secrets of famous people such as Brittany Murphy and Pablo Escobar.

Lindsey also created her blog, The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice. She resides in the United Kingdom. She also is a regular contributor to significant publications such as Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, New Scientist, and more.

Lindsey attended the University of Oxford, where she got her Ph.D. in the history of science, medicine, and technology in 2009. She also received a postdoctoral award from the Wellcome Trust in 2010.

She is the writer behind The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. The book was published in 2017. The book was positively received and did so well that it was translated into several other languages. It also won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award in the category of literary science writing. It was also picked in 2018 to be an American Library Association’s notable nonfiction book. It also made the short list the same year in the U.K. for the Wellcome Book Prize and Wolfson History Prize.

Fitzharris also wrote The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I. The 2022 book tells the story of the innovative surgeon Harold Gillies, who worked to rebuilt soldiers’ faces when they had become disfigured as a result of battle.

She also has appeared as a guest on popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience in March 2019, with the cast garnering millions of downloads.

The Butchering Art is a nonfiction book where Fitzharris goes into the unusual world of surgery in the nineteenth century. The field is about to be profoundly transforms.

The author talks about the brutal early operating theaters and surgeons that did all of their work before the now-normal advent of administering anesthesia. This is when strength particularly applied, as well as working with speed.

These pioneers in the field understood that what came after a surgery was done was frequently even more dangerous than what their patient was dealing with in the first place. They were also confused by the infections that kept happening that made the mortality rates so high. This was a time in history when surgery was full of hazards.

This is when Joseph Lister came forward, a young surgeon who was a Quaker that seemed poised to solve this conundrum and through doing so, change how history unfolded. The author tells the reader about the discoveries he made in great detail. The most important belief that he had was that germs caused infection and could be fought through the use of antiseptics.

The book focuses on 1850 to 1875, showing the reader not only Lister but some of his peers at the time. Some were intelligent, and some were criminal. It takes the reader through the medical schools and hospitals where they learned to do surgery, the places of the dead where they further studied human anatomy, and even the cemeteries that some of them would look for cadavers in.

Interesting and informative, this book is primarily about a surgeon who aimed to advance the field of science and medicine and achieved it. Check it out to read more about this topic and catch all of Fitzharris’s insights into history for yourself!

The Facemaker is the innovative and true tale of a surgeon who not only rebuilt the faces of the injured soldiers of World War I but was a true visionary, leading the advances of modern plastic surgery into a new age.

The first World War showed humanity that the heavy-duty military technology that was used had pulled far ahead of the various medical capacity that existed to treat soldiers. Soldiers saw their bodies gassed, battered, and shot. The war caused millions of deaths but also left a number of soldiers not only wounded but disfigured too.

Dealing with all of this were also people who were doing their best to care for the soldiers that had been through so much. This book tells the story of one in particular: Harold Gillies. The plastic surgeon was pioneering new approaches in his field, dedicating himself to the soldiers he was caring for to reconstruct their faces.

Gillies was from New Zealand and educated at Cambridge. After he had seen the damage done to soldiers on the Western front, he started to become interested in plastic surgery. When he came back to England, he was able to build and establish one of the first hospitals in the world to solely focus on facial reconstruction.

It was there that he was able to put together a group of people that were tasked with building up once more what had been ruined, and to try to re-create faces that had been, for lack of a better term, destroyed. It was simple enough to lose just a limb through battle, where you could still be seen as a hero.

Having a face that was utterly disfigured by war, on the other hand, was more difficult to take. The extreme loss of a normal face made many appear monstrous to society, which had not adapted to then embrace being disfigured. Through his work and his care, Gillies was able to give back faces to the wounded and restore not only their physical features but their spirits too.

The Facemaker tells the tale of this plastic surgeon’s innovations in the field and his dedication to those who needed additional care. These soldiers had their sense of self rocked by their disfigurement. Inside is the tale of one man and what his determination was able to accomplish for several men who had been through hell and back. Pick up a copy of this book to live the story for yourself and be inspired!