The Surgeon’s Apprentice

By Sara Fraser

In the first part of the nineteenth century, James Kerr, an ambitious young man with a burning vocation to become a doctor, joins his uncle’s practice in the North of England as a surgeon’s apprentice. 

But at that time medicine was still a primitive, brutal business, and James’s cherished ideals about the role of the doctor, and the dignity of the medical establishment, are soon shown up as hollow illusions.

James falls in love with Liddy Landser, the young and beautiful daughter of one of his patients. But Liddy’s father, proprietor of a local salt mine, is in financial trouble, and his futile attempts to save the business and family name by entrusting his debts to Edward Harcourt, a man with an equal appetite for power and for female flesh, sink them all into penury and disgrace.

Sara Fraser is a pseudonym for Roy Clews, a one-time Marine Commando and Foreign Legionnaire who has travelled and worked all over the world.