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In this innovative, engaging, and archivally rich history, Michael Brown explores the relationship between emotions and surgery in the long nineteenth century. He examines how it transforms our understanding of the history of surgery and demolishes long-standing myths and stereotypes.
List of contents
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.
About the author
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).
Summary
In this innovative, engaging, and archivally rich history, Michael Brown explores the relationship between emotions and surgery in the long nineteenth century. He examines how it transforms our understanding of the history of surgery and demolishes long-standing myths and stereotypes.
Foreword
An innovative analytical account of the changing place of emotions in British surgery in the long nineteenth century.
