The Cutting

‘Pressing a wad of muslin hard on the wound, I stared at the Cancer and I thought how strange and terrible it was that the body, in its darkness and secrecy, produces Additions that can bring it to the grave.’

Taken from ‘The Cutting’ by Rose Tremain in Granta 120: Medicine, in Granta 120: Medicine, available for download here and in bookshops.

Illustration by Kanitta Meechubot.

You can also see Rose Tremain or hear her work read at the following events:

A Spoonful of Fiction: A Granta Salon
3 September, doors open at 6 p.m., event at 7 p.m., The Last Tuesday Society, 11 Mare Street London E8 4RP. £10, includes a copy of Granta 120: Medicine and a drink. Click here or call The Last Tuesday Society for tickets: 08444 771000.

In this special edition of Liars’ League, actors from the live fiction salon perform stories of healing and the history of medicine by Rose Tremain and Terrence Holt, as featured in Granta 120: Medicine. Then, writer and broadcaster Colin Grant (Bageye at the Wheel, I & I: Marley, Tosh and Wailer), in conversation with a Granta editor, tells how he pursued and then quit medical school and reads from his new autobiographical novel extracted in granta.com. In association with Last Tuesday Society artist-in-residence Joanna Ebenstein of Brooklyn’s Observatory Gallery and the Morbid Anatomy blog.

An Evening with Rose Tremain
4 September, doors open at 6.45 p.m., event at 7 p.m., The Wellcome Collection Library, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE. Free, but tickets must be booked in advance by emailing events@granta.com.

Rose Tremain joins Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey for an exclusive preview event of her highly anticipated novel Merivel. Enjoy a reading and conversation on medicine and the relationship between a king and his favourite physician in the seventeenth century, a time when opium, brandy and prayer served as anaesthesia, and a scalpel was the only tool one could use to eradicate a cancer. Drinks will be served and there will be a special offer on Granta 120: Medicine and Merivel.