Craddock’s explanation of how this knowledge made its way from a coastal village in Calabria to the great university cities of Europe encompasses ancient agriculture, the Galenic doctrine of the four bodily humours, and an illuminating digression about Renaissance gardens. The chapters on blood transfusion and tooth transplantation achieve an equally happy synthesis of intellectual and medical history, drawing on Cartesian philosophy, Vitalism and the remarkable inventions of Jacques de Vaucanson, who constructed automata that included a realistic defecating duck.

This parade of death and disease, human ingenuity mingled with so much callousness, and a succession of eminent medics motivated more by the thrill of acclaim than Hippocratic duty or the milk of human kindness, can make for queasy reading, but the author, a research associate at UCL and the Science Museum, strives to keep it compelling...Occasional gleams of spontaneous humanity certainly come as a relief..

The charm and value of Spare Parts comes from situating these landmarks in a wider history of ideas.

... a thrilling and often terrifying ride through transplantation and the theories and techniques that made it possible..

The cultural thread of transplant is measured in quacks, innovators and medical somersaults, told through the voice of a historian handling dense levels of research.

Craddock provides entertaining details of the lives involved along the way.

... accessible and wide-ranging.