Abstract
This chapter examines histories of surgery from antiquity to the twentieth century as polemical devices. It looks at how the history of surgery was presented as the rise from crude butchery to the noblest of modern enterprises based on science, and contrasts the aim of those histories praising surgery as part of the whole Art of Medicine versus those presenting it as an independent craft. While history ceased to be a part of the everyday life of the surgeon from around 1850, many current questions investigated by historians have their roots deep in the surgical past.
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Further Reading
Celsus on Medicine, 4 vols, (Cambridge MA: Loeb Classical Library Edition, 1935).
Chauliac, Guy de. Capitulum Singulare, annotated by Michael McVaugh, in Edward Grant (ed), A Source Book of Medieval Science (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 791–795.
Hannaway, Caroline and Ann La Berge, eds Constructing Paris Medicine (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Editions Rodopi BV, 1998).
Huisman, Frank and John Harley Warner, eds Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Johns, Elizabeth. Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
Lawrence, Christopher. ‘Divine, Democratic and Heroic: the History and Historiography of Surgery,’ in Medical Theory: Surgical Practice, ed Christopher Lawrence (London: Routledge, 1992), 1–48.
Lawrence, Christopher and Michael Brown. ‘Quintessentially Modern Heroes: Surgeons, Explorers, and Empire, c.1840–1914,’ Journal of Social History 50 (2016): 148–178.
McVaugh, Michael. ‘Surgical Education in the Middle Ages,’ Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 20 (2000): 283–304.
Nutton, Vivian. ‘Humanist Surgery,’ in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, eds A. Wear, R. K. French and I. M. Lonie (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 75–99.
Temkin, Owsei. ‘The Role of Surgery in the rise of Modern Medical Thought,’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 25 (1951): 248–259.
Warner, John Harley. Against the Spirit of System. The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Acknowledgements
Thanks, as ever, to Jan Robinson for a penultimate read. For comments, thanks to Sally Frampton and Thomas Schlich, and to Mike Brown for working together on some of the ideas in the latter section.
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Lawrence, C. (2018). Surgery and Its Histories: Purposes and Contexts. In: Schlich, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95260-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95260-1_2
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