Druin Burch, 34, studied Human Sciences at Oxford. After research in human and chimpanzee genetics, he studied medicine and has worked in hospitals across south east England. He teaches human evolution, physiology and ecology at Oxford, and writes for medical journals, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. This is his first book. He lives in the Cotswolds.

Mark Thwaite: What gave you the idea for Digging Up The Dead?

Druin Burch: I'd been interested in its main character – Astley Cooper – for some time. He is a huge figure in the life of John Keats, and in the Keats biographies you hear about Cooper as being both a charismatic man and an exceptionally famous surgeon. But in my life as a doctor I had never heard of him. These people who are so exceedingly famous in their day and then slip out of history hold an immediate fascination for me. I found a wonderful story in Elizabeth Gaskell's life of Bronte, with the Bronte sisters – who had no connections to Cooper or surgery – sitting and playing a game which involved them each picking out the three most famous people of their time. Cooper's name came ahead of Wellington's.

MT: How long did it take you to write and research your book?

DB: Hard to say. The research was spread out over several years, but not full time. The writing was fitted into periods of work in-between my own hospital work. In my head I think of it as having added up to about a year's full time work, but that's a wild guess.

MT: Do you enjoy the research or were you impatient to get down to the actual writing?

DB: I enjoyed both, but found it hard to swap between them. When I was reading I always wanted to keep going – to find one more journal or newspaper report, look in one more book or museum collection. Whenever I swapped over to the writing I found it incredibly frustrating if I got to a point where I needed to break off and look something up.

MT: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

DB: Always onto a computer – too much of an ingrained habit to break. I make notes in longhand, and then type them up afterwards, but again that's entirely a habit rather than a deliberate choice. I often wonder if my writing would be different if I changed these things – but I suspect I'll always find it too difficult to find out.

MT: Your book is the story of Astley Cooper -- tell us a little about the man who became surgeon to the royal family and who taught Keats Druin.

DB: He was a wild and handsome boy born into a conservative family in Norfolk. With a taste for adventure he found life as a surgical student dull at first, but then something about it absolutely fired up his imagination. It was very much combined for him with a passion for radical politics – which meant a belief in democracy. He went to Paris during the French Revolution, taking his pregnant wife with him, to study at the hospitals and the listen to the politicians. His life in England was a mix of radical politics, bodysnatching, horrific animal vivisection, even more horrific operations on fully alert patients, and ultimately an exceptional career as a revolutionary new sort of surgeon. After he died The Times declared him to have been the richest professional man to have ever lived – of any profession and across the whole of Europe.

What really interested me ended up not being his worldly success, but the way in which such an appalling working environment – rotting corpses and screaming patients – could fire his passion to such a degree. He was absolutely in love with his work, and this was what Keats admired in him. There was a huge concern among the Romantic poets as to the meaning of beauty. They were not men interested in 'prettiness' – they were enraptured by the aesthetic qualities of what really mattered. So you get Hazlitt writing about how a fresh dissection of a human brain must hold as much beauty to a surgeon as flowers to an artist, and Keats comparing the effect he wanted his poetry to have on the human spirit with that of surgery on the body. Both Keats and Cooper were deeply attached to the idea that suffering, bodily or mental, was not to be avoided if it led on to things – a painful operation to an improved physical condition, or a painful experience to a mental one.

MT: You are a physician -- how did this help you write your book?

DB: It gave me a head start when it came to understanding the technical aspects, but it was most valuable for the emotional ones. I had enough experience of death and disease and physical horrors to set me off in pursuit of what it must have been like for people like Cooper and Keats. Throughout the book I use some of my own experiences to try and offer this to the reader. Contrasting the life of an eighteenth century surgeon with contemporary experiences of medicine really helped Cooper's life come vividly alive for me as a writer; hopefully it does the same for readers. It does seem to have been a part of the book that people have enjoyed. I was trying to make a dead man's life feel immediate, almost a bit novelistic.

MT: Cooper set up an international network of bodysnatchers to facilitate his research -- did he have rob graves to do his work? do you forgive him!?

DB: He was called the King of the Bodysnatchers. When Parliament was belatedly trying to work out how to solve the problem, Cooper was the first witness called. Surgeons needed to dissect in order to be competent, yet bodies were not really available legally. Cooper stepped before Parliament and told them how things were. Either we mangle the dead, he said, or we mangle the living – you choose. Then he added that the politicians really had no choice at all, and boasted that there was no-one alive whose body he could not obtain after their death if he chose. It was a pointed remark: don't assume that we only steal the bodies of the poor, he was telling them, and use that thought and your own self-interest to excuse yourselves from taking any action.

I forgive him entirely for his bodysnatching; it was part of the way he was struggling to make the world a better place. Most of his colleagues treated the bodysnatchers they employed as dirt, the way society as a whole saw them. Cooper valued them, looking after them and their families in every way he could.

I don't forgive him for many of his animal experiments. There were some that were useful, but he allowed himself to be brutalised by the abundant cruelties and horrors of his world, and got a little bit too used to causing pain.

MT: Do you read the critics? Have you been pleased with the responses to your book? Have you learned anything from them?

DB: I've read most of the critics. A good review is an absolutely joy to read – one that praises but also does so in a way that makes you feel the book had gripped them and made them think. What could gladden your heart more? Occasionally reviews can ignore a book altogether, and be excuses for a reviewer to talk about something else entirely – these are difficult to take. I also had the genuine pleasure of one negative but deeply thoughtful review – the author felt the book failed because it was part tragedy, part comedy, part history and part memoir. Exactly the mix that it seems to me real lives are actually made of.

MT: What do you do when you are not writing?

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

DB: Not really. I tried writing something that gripped me as I wrote it. I've spent a lot of time teaching students who write weekly essays. They clearly expect to find writing the essays boring, and they produce boring work as a result. It hasn't occurred to most of them that their first duty is to make their work interesting to themselves – and when they do, it has a chance of being interesting to others as well.

MT: What are you working on now?

DB: Two things, one a novel. The other is the historical tale of how doctors have gradually abandoned the arrogance and complacency that were their mainstays for most of human history – the qualities that kept leeches in wide use for thousands of years, despite them helping to kill or harm most of the people they were applied to.

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

DB: My favourite is whoever I'm enjoying most at the time – any good book should be your favourite for at least the period you're reading it, the classics are ones that stick with you long afterwards. I'm going through a Jane Austen period at the moment, something that happens to me every few years with what feels like increasing admiration and enjoyment on every occasion. My favourite books are those so gripping they seem by contrast to suck the life out of the days spent reading them. Recent ones have been mixed – beyond Austen they've included Anne Fadiman's essays, a book on a single bacterium (E. coli) by the American science writer Carl Zimmer called Microcosm, and Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle.

MT: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

DB: Read a lot and work a lot. And pray that you're born one of those writers, like Jane Austen, to whom things seem to come naturally – rather than someone like Orwell who appeared to have to teach himself how to write very slowly and painfully.

MT: Anything else you would like to say?

DB: Don't be put off Digging Up The Dead by a distaste for surgery, corpses, pain or science! These are some of the things that make the story of Astley Cooper's life surprisingly enthralling, just as they made him captivating to people like his student Keats.