ABOUT BOOK

In this chapter I have endeavoured to demonstrate the ways in which an ~approach that takes the emotions seriously might nuance and complicate ~our understandings of the history of pre-anaesthetic surgery. In general, ~historians have tended to focus on the operations of surgical dispassion, or ~what we might now term clinical detachment. What this research suggests, ~however, is that compassion and emotional expression played a surprisingly ~important role in shaping the cultures of early nineteenth-century operative ~surgery as well as the identities of its practitioners. In the decades immediately ~preceding the advent of anaesthesia, pain became a central concern of ~surgical discourse and the response to this concern was shaped by the cultures ~of sentiment and sensibility. However, this culture of compassion was ~no ‘natural’ reaction to a self-evident problem. Rather, it was a culturally ~and historically contingent phenomenon which could be harnessed to the ~ideologies and ambitions of medical reform. In the hands of men like John ~Bell and Thomas Wakley, the image of the surgeon as a man of refined and ~honest sentiment was linked to a critique of the medical and surgical ancien ~regime, providing an idealised representation of a more expert, meritocratic ~and altruistic profession.