The year is 1816, and James Hammond is training to be a surgeon at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. He spends hours dissecting cadavers to learn anatomy and recognizes the moral hazard in this enterprise. Who are the monsters: the resurrection men who dig up newly buried bodies and deliver them to London's medical schools … or the surgeons who pay for the fresh corpses? His conscience is not much bothered by the answer. He readily pays the body-snatchers for their filthy commodity, for they spare him the trouble of digging up the dead himself.
When his friend Franklin Doyle begs him to treat his fiancée's broken arm, Hammond answers the call of duty. He travels to Chertsey, where Doyle's fiancée, Henrietta Lavelle, lives. On arriving he finds that Henrietta's mangled arm has been treated by a local surgeon whose old-fashioned ideas and poor surgical skills threaten her life. Never before has Hammond felt such anxiety when treating a patient, but then he remembers that he stands at the elbow of giants—those surgeons who dare to perform complex operations without anesthesia, without good antiseptics … with little more than courage and raw skill. The decision to treat her is right and proper, but it challenges his confidence and upends his future. "Ravaging the Dead" is Book 1 in the "Surgeon's Duty" series.