In this innovative analytical account of the place of emotion and embodiment in nineteenth-century British surgery, Michael Brown examines the changing emotional dynamics of surgical culture for both surgeons and patients from the pre-anaesthetic era through the introduction of anaesthesia and antisepsis techniques. Drawing on diverse archival and published sources, Brown explores how an emotional regime of Romantic sensibility, in which emotions played a central role in the practice and experience of surgery, was superseded by one of scientific modernity, in which the emotions of both patient and practitioner were increasingly marginalised. Demonstrating that the cultures of contemporary surgery and the emotional identities of its practitioners have their origins in the cultural and conceptual upheavals of the later nineteenth century, this book challenges us to question our perception of the pre-anaesthetic period as an era of bloody brutality and casual cruelty. This title is also available as open access.
By:
Michael Brown (Lancaster University)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781108792233
ISBN 10: 1108792235
Pages: 324
Publication Date: 08 May 2025
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction; 1. Between art and artifice: emotion and performance in Romantic surgery; 2. Anxiety and compassion: emotional intersubjectivity and the Romantic surgical relationship; 3. The patient's voice: conscious and unconscious agency in Romantic surgery; 4. 'Scenes of cruelty and blood': emotion, melodrama, and the politics of Romantic surgical reform; 5. Quiescent bodies: utilitarianism and the reconfiguration of surgical emotion; 6. The 'new world of surgery': sepsis, sentiment, and scientific modernity; Epilogue: new pasts, new futures.
Michael Brown is a historian at Lancaster University. He is co-editor of Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century (2019) and author of Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c.1760-1850 (2011), as well as numerous articles on the history of medicine, war, gender, and emotion. Between 2016 and 2021 he was the Principal Investigator on the Wellcome Trust Investigator Award project Surgery & Emotion (108667/Z/15/Z).
Reviews for Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793–1912
'Pain and compassion, sentiment and science: these are the themes that Michael Brown explores in his history of surgery. By fusing the history of emotions with the history of medicine, Brown sheds new light on clinical interactions. The book is an original and enthralling account of the emotional lives of surgeons.' Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London 'Based on a wealth of new and relevant sources, this book analyses the story of a key period in the history of modern surgery in a novel and original way. In combining the history of emotions with the history of surgery it is a model of what professional history of medicine can and should do.' Thomas Schlich, McGill University
