The second part of the book tells the same time, the same events, but from the perspective of a young man trying to regain the honor of his family. Her body is butchered in a ham-handed dissection, and De Cola leaves for the continent, writing his story years later out of ire that his discovery of how to transfuse blood has been attributed to others. He and Lower invent blood transfusion to treat the old woman, mother of servant girl Sarah Blundy, who is impugned as a harlot, tried, and executed for the murder-by- poison of an Oxford Fellow. He falls in with Richard Lower, treats an old woman for a broken leg, and gets tied up in a murder trial. It starts simply enough, with the tale of Marco De Cola, younger son of a Venetian merchant, a dilettante, wandering Europe studying philosophy and medicine. It mixes fictional characters with historical personalities against the backdrop of the first few years of the return of monarchy after Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate. This 1999 novel by Iain Pears relates the strange events in and around Oxford in 1663.
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