A friend recommended this novel because of my interest in medical history. In early 19th-century England, it turns out, a dress lodger was a prostitute living in a common lodging house, one step from homelessness. The landlord would lend her an expensive gown in which to ply her street trade. The story of this particular young dress lodger, Gustine, is set in the port town of Sunderland in 1831, when the cholera sweeping across Europe first reached England. Gustine is a distinct, original, and believable protagonist whose considerable adventures make in themselves a good, well-written story.
Cholera advances inexorably as a tide, and who knows how.
At the same time, English newspapers are full of the Burke and Hare scandals in Scotland, the disclosure that beggars and derelicts are being murdered to furnish medical schools with always-scarce cadavers. Gustine, as it happens, has a baby with ectopia cordis . Her fellow lodgers are beginning, suddenly and gruesomely, to sicken and die. Henry's and Gustine's paths cross. Ms. Holman, who lives in New York, conducted much of her exhaustive research for this book in the collections of the New York Academy of Medicine, the University of Newcastle, and the Hunterian Museum in London.