Beyond Thomas Wakley: invisible actors and hidden voices in The Lancet during the 19th century
October 2023
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Journal article
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Lancet
In 1893 The Lancet published an editorial reflecting on the legacy of its first Editor, Thomas Wakley, who led the journal from its inception in 1823 to his death in 1862. The Lancet was, the article proclaimed, “the ‘incarnation’ of Thomas Wakley”. In the years after Wakley's death, this version of The Lancet's history cemented and stuck. His name remains integral to the journal to this day, as in the annual Wakley Prize. The Lancet's mission to expose medical corruption was inextricably linked with Wakley's own political inclinations, and he is justly lauded for his pioneering role in socially driven medical journalism. But even in its earliest days The Lancet was never a solo effort. Just as the journal's content provides historical insight into health services and systems, so its own structures have a history to be explored.
FFR
The Lancet: an archive of surgical history
October 2023
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Journal article
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Lancet
From the first days of The Lancet 200 years ago, surgery has had a central role in its existence. The journal has acted as a nerve centre, linking surgical innovation by individuals with challenge and debate in the wider profession. Such innovation shapes and is shaped by the social and political context of its time. Looking back over two centuries, the journal's many research articles, letters, and commentaries relating to surgery provide an invaluable insight that goes far beyond specific discoveries or breakthroughs.
FFR
Beyond ‘born not made’: challenging character, emotions and professionalism in undergraduate medical education
May 2022
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Journal article
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Medical Humanities
In this article we explore the historical antecedents and ongoing perpetuation of the idea that medical professionals must adhere to a specific ‘character’. In the late nineteenth century, an ideal of the medical student as ‘born not made’ was substantiated through medical school opening addresses and other medical literature. An understanding prevailed that students would have a natural inclination that would suit them to medical work, which was predicated on class structures. As we move into the twentieth-century context, we see that such underpinnings remained, even if the idea of ‘character’ becomes ‘characteristics’. This was articulated through emerging psychological and sociological perspectives on education, as well as medical school admission processes. The significance ascribed to character and characteristics-based suitability continues to exclude and limits who can access medical careers. In the final part of the article, we argue that a framework of uncertainty can and should be mobilised to re-evaluate the role of doctors’ education and critique long-standing notions of professional identity, via the integration of medical humanities and clearer professionalism teaching within medical curricula.
FFR
‘“A Borderland in Ethics”: medical journals, the public and the medical profession in nineteenth-century Britain
March 2020
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Chapter
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Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: How they Constructed Communities
SBTMR
The medical press and its public
February 2020
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Chapter
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The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900
Mind-boggling medical history: Creating a medical history game for nurses
May 2019
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Journal article
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Science Museum Group Journal
FFR
Reading medicine and health in periodicals
October 2018
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Journal article
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Media History
This special issue of Media History, arising from a workshop on nineteenth-century medical and health periodicals, aims to explore both the contemporary significance and readership of these periodicals, but also how their study has been approached by historians. We discuss existing work on medical periodicals—considering how these publications have been studied by literary and historical scholars—and how our understanding and use of them has developed in an era of digitisation. Finally, we examine how the contributors to this volume each highlight important issues in terms of the interpretation, reading, and materiality of medical and health periodicals.
reading, medicine, digitisation, periodicals, nineteenth century
Belly-rippers, surgical innovation and the ovariotomy controversy
September 2018
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Book
This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, while also remaining at the boundaries of ethical acceptability. This book traces the operation’s innovation, from its roots in eighteenth-century pathology, through the denouncement of those who performed it as ‘belly-rippers’, to its rapid uptake in the 1880s, when ovariotomists were accused of over-operating. Throughout the century, the operation was never a hair’s breadth from controversy.
science
Opening the abdomen: The expansion of surgery
January 2018
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Chapter
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The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery
Defining difference: competing forms of ovarian surgery in the nineteenth century
May 2017
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Chapter
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Technological Change in Modern Surgery: Historical Perspectives on Innovation
SBTMR
Honour and subsistence: invention, credit and surgery in the nineteenth century
November 2016
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Journal article
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British Journal for the History of Science
The origins of contemporary exclusion of surgical methods from patenting lie in the complexities of managing credit claims in operative surgery, recognized in the nineteenth century. While surgical methods were not deemed patentable, surgeons were nevertheless embedded within patent culture. In an atmosphere of heightened awareness about the importance of ‘inventors’, how surgeons should be recognized and rewarded for their inventions was an important question. I examine an episode during the 1840s which seemed to concretize the inapplicability of patents to surgical practice, before looking at alternatives to patenting, used by surgeons to gain social and financial credit for inventions.
John Wickham’s new surgery: ‘Minimally invasive therapy’, innovation, and approaches to medical practice in twentieth-century Britain
October 2016
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Journal article
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Social History of Medicine
The term ‘minimally invasive’ was coined in 1986 to describe a range of procedures that involved making very small incisions or no incision at all for diseases traditionally treated by open surgery. We examine this major shift in British medical practice as a means of probing the nature of surgical innovation in the twentieth century. We first consider how concerns regarding surgical invasiveness had long been present in surgery, before examining how changing notions of post-operative care formed a foundation for change. We then go on to focus on a professional network involved in the promotion of minimally invasive therapy led by the urologist John Wickham. The minimally invasive movement, we contend, brought into focus tensions between surgical innovation and the evidence-based model of medical practice. Premised upon professional collaborations beyond surgery and a re-positioning of the patient role, we show how the movement elucidated changing notions of surgical authority.
The Debris of Life: Diseased Ovaries in Eighteenth-Century Medicine
November 2015
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Chapter
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The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century
The definitive collection on eighteenth-century generation and its many milieus, The Secrets of Generation will be an essential resource for studying this topic for years to come.
The usual story of medicine in the past couple of centuries is one of growing professionalisation, and increasing distance between patients and practitioners. But is a new era of public participation in medicine upon us? Clinicians and patients are moving towards shared decision making in many areas, whilst some medical journals now invite patients to take part in peer review. Citizen Science projects, such as Cell Slider run by Cancer Research UK and Zooniverse, have enabled the public to contribute to medical research. Such developments open up new possibilities.
Surgical outcomes: a Victorian viewpoint
January 2015
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Journal article
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Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England
Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy [Book review]