Redeeming Mr Sawbone: compassion and care in the cultures of nineteenth-century surgery

TY - JOUR

T1 - Redeeming Mr Sawbone: compassion and care in the cultures of nineteenth-century surgery

AU - Brown, Michael

PY - 2017/11/29

Y1 - 2017/11/29

N2 - ObjectiveTo complicate understandings of the emotions involved in the surgical encounter.MethodsI draw on an extensive body of historical material to demonstrate the importance of compassion and sympathy to the professional identities and experiences of early nineteenth-century British surgeons and use this information to reflect on what lessons can be learned for contemporary practice.ResultsThis research demonstrates that compassion and sympathy for the patient were a vital part of surgery in the decades immediately preceding the introduction of anaesthesia in the 1840s and that they played a vital role in shaping the professional identity of the surgeon.ConclusionThis research suggests that we might develop more complex and inclusive ways of thinking about the doctor-patient relationship in surgery and that we can draw on the experiences of the past to ensure that we take compassion seriously as a vital element of the intersubjective clinical encounter.KeywordsSurgery, Emotion, Compassion, Doctor-patient relationship, History, Professional identity© 2017, The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

AB - ObjectiveTo complicate understandings of the emotions involved in the surgical encounter.MethodsI draw on an extensive body of historical material to demonstrate the importance of compassion and sympathy to the professional identities and experiences of early nineteenth-century British surgeons and use this information to reflect on what lessons can be learned for contemporary practice.ResultsThis research demonstrates that compassion and sympathy for the patient were a vital part of surgery in the decades immediately preceding the introduction of anaesthesia in the 1840s and that they played a vital role in shaping the professional identity of the surgeon.ConclusionThis research suggests that we might develop more complex and inclusive ways of thinking about the doctor-patient relationship in surgery and that we can draw on the experiences of the past to ensure that we take compassion seriously as a vital element of the intersubjective clinical encounter.KeywordsSurgery, Emotion, Compassion, Doctor-patient relationship, History, Professional identity© 2017, The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

KW - SurgerY

KW - emotional

KW - ,

KW - Professional identity

KW - Compassion

KW - History

KW - Doctor-patient relationship

U2 - 10.1186/s40639-017-0042-2

DO - 10.1186/s40639-017-0042-2

M3 - Article

SN - 2053-2393

JO - Journal of Compassionate Health Care

JF - Journal of Compassionate Health Care

ER -