The Night Surgeon's Quarantine
A Satire of Humors and Bureaucracy

About this book:

In the fetid, bolted ward of Saint Jude-in-the-Muck, the plague is merely the second-worst thing killing people. The first is the paperwork.

Master Christopher Finch and his apprentice Ned are trapped behind the parish seal with forty-odd dying souls, a deaf nurse who survives on gin and pickled cabbage, and a physician whose cures—ground in Galen, astrology, and a pathological refusal to admit error—are considerably more lethal than the pestilence. Armed with rusty fleams, weeviled rhubarb, and a ledger that must balance even when the patients don't, they wage a war on two fronts: against the humors run riot in the ward, and against a bureaucracy that demands men die *legally*, in triplicate, with the correct astrological notation.

Darkly comic and historically textured, *The Night Surgeon's Quarantine* is a satire of medicine and officialdom where the only thing spreading faster than the spotted ague is the ink. For fans of *The Knick*, *Monty Python*, and anyone who has ever suspected that the system is the disease.