Activities per year
Abstract
This chapter explores the place of emotion within operative surgery. Before the advent of anaesthetics in the 1840s, surgical operations were conducted with little or no pain relief and were attended with great suffering and emotional distress. It has generally been assumed that in order to cope with such challenges, surgeons developed a culture of dispassion and emotional detachment. However, building upon the insights of the history of the emotions, this chapter will demonstrate that the operating theatre could play host to a wide range of more complex feelings including fear, pity, and sympathy. Moreover, it suggests that any account of emotion in the history of surgery must take into account the politics of feeling and the ‘emotional regimes’ of the period.
© 2017 The Author. 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/
© 2017 The Author. 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/
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery |
Editors | Thomas Schlich |
Place of Publication | London |
Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Pages | 327-348 |
Number of pages | 22 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-349-95260-1 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-349-95259-5 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 14 Dec 2017 |
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Osler Club Meeting: Emotions in pre-anaesthetic surgery: beyond the myth of dispassion
Michael Brown (Presenter)
24 Oct 2019Activity: Public engagement and outreach › Public speaking engagements
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Edward Worth Library Lecture, Doctor Steevens’ Hospital: Surgery and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century
Michael Brown (Presenter)
11 Oct 2019Activity: Public engagement and outreach › Public speaking engagements
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Operating with Feeling @ The Royal College of Surgeons of London
Michael Brown (Organiser), Michael Brown (Participant), Agnes Arnold-Forster (Organiser) & Lauren Ryall-Stockton (Organiser)
1 Jun 2018Activity: Public engagement and outreach › Workshop and other training
Projects
- 1 Finished