Dr Alana Skuse

speaker

639 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 8 May

Dr Alana Skuse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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You're Dead to Me · Renaissance Medicine: healthcare and disease in early modern England · 6 Feb 2026 podcast

Can you imagine?

Four-part harmonies while sawing away.

So the barbers, they are pretty handy with a razor.

And the monks that were doing most of the medicine back in the medieval period are not actually supposed to spill blood.

So they get the barbers in to do things like that.

And then eventually some of the barbers, they're pretty much just working as surgeons and they decide, OK, we should formalise this.

And they get their company of barber surgeons in 1534.

So there's this picture of Henry VIII handing over a charter to this company while the physicians stand on his other side looking like they've swallowed a bee.

And then they decide, OK, now we've kind of divvied it up.

The surgeons are going to do the surgery and the barbers are going to cut the hair and never the twain shall meet.

They're doing lots of surgeries.

We always think that they're either letting blood or they're hacking someone's leg off that is already kind of dangling off.

But actually, they do a lot of amputations, but they also do operations for kidney and bladder stones.

They do mastectomies.

Yeah, it's horrible.

Whoa.

Oh, cataracts.

Oh, they're just plucking that out, aren't they?

No, it's bad.

Yeah, basically.

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