When newly divorced Julia Hamill finds a human skull buried in her backyard, she begins to identify with the nameless female murdered a century ago. “Julia in her own way felt discarded,” says bestseller Tess Gerritsen whose novel, The Bone Garden, unveils the dirty habits of doctors in the early nineteenth century. “Her husband dumped her and when she discovers the bone in her yard, she feels an attachment to this unnamed woman.”
Back in 1830, Boston hero Oliver Wendell Holmes discovered that washing hands could save lives. “Medicine was crude in those days. Doctors didn’t wash their hands,” says Gerritsen, herself a doctor who was inspired to write The Bone Garden because of Holmes’ simple but radical finding at the time. “They came from working with cadavers and infected their patients, unknowingly.”
In The Bone Garden, resurrectionists aka body snatchers dig up cadavers and sell them to medical schools. “They’d put them into barrels, pickled in brine and transport them on body trains to the medical schools in the northeast,” says Gerritsen. Norris Marshal, a poor medical student who digs up graves at night to earn money, becomes a prime suspect after a nurse is found brutally murdered on hospital grounds.
As Gerritsen researched past medical practices, she came across a few gruesome details while poring over old medical textbooks. “I have a medical textbook from the 1820s which describes how to amputate an arm," she says. "The basic principal is: do it fast! Interestingly, people didn’t often die from the amputation, they died a few weeks later from infection from doctors not washing their hands.”
Tess Gerritsen is the New York Times bestselling author of a dozen thrillers. Her novels have been #1 bestsellers in both Germany and the UK. Her books have been translated into 31 languages and have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Winner of both the Nero Wolfe Award and the Rita Award, Gerritsen began her writing career when she took a maternity leave from her work as a physician. Retired from medicine, she writes full time and lives in Maine.
