This film tells the untold story of a great British troublemaker and social reformer, Thomas Wakley (1795–1862). A surgeon by trade, Wakley campaigned against ‘quackery’ in his medical journal The Lancet . He was sued for describing one surgeon’s botched attempt to remove a stone from a fully conscious patient – who later died from blood loss. Bold, brash and irrepressible, he railed against miracle cures, spiritual mediums , makeshift orphanages and so-called ‘expert’ surgeons who were more suited to tree-cutting than limbs. The poor often died of ‘visitations from God’ and Wakley was there to demand autopsies for them. His exposes made him many enemies, and one night, some unknown assailants stabbed him in his surgery in 1820. His offices were set alight, but Wakley managed to climb out of the skylight to safety. Wakley became MP for Finsbury and later, a coroner in Middlesex. These were calculated moves designed to further his campaigns against workhouses and abuses of the poor. Like his great friend Charles Dickens, Wakley lived next to the Norfolk Street poorhouse on the Strand. The two men bonded at the inquest of a poor housemaid who was wrongly accused of infanticide after her child...