The Way of All Flesh

Edinburgh, 1847. Medical student Will Raven enters the household of Professor James Young Simpson just as the city’s doctors are experimenting with new ways to defeat surgical and obstetric pain. Raven’s excitement at joining one of Edinburgh’s most celebrated physicians is darkened by the death of Evie Lawson, a young woman he knew in the Old Town. When other women die in similarly agonising circumstances, Raven joins forces with Simpson’s sharp and ambitious housemaid Sarah Fisher to trace the connection between the victims, dangerous medicines and the city’s criminal underworld.

The murder investigation unfolds against a genuine turning point in medical history. Simpson’s experiments with ether and chloroform place Raven at the centre of the revolution in anaesthesia, while Sarah’s exclusion from formal medical training exposes how tightly education and professional status were controlled by gender and class. Parry uses the contrast between Edinburgh’s New Town consulting rooms and the poverty of the Old Town to make scientific progress inseparable from the people whose bodies, labour and risks made that progress possible.