British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 1860–1918

When women agitated to join the medical profession in Britain during the 1860s, the practice of surgery proved both a help (women were neat, patient and used to needlework) and a hindrance (surgery was brutal, bloody and distinctly unfeminine). In this major new study, Claire Brock examines the cultural, social and self-representation of the woman surgeon from the second half of the nineteenth century until the end of the Great War. Drawing on a rich archive of British hospital records, she investigates precisely what surgery women performed and how these procedures affected their personal and professional reputation, as well as the reactions of their patients to these new phenomena. Essential reading for those interested in the history of medicine, British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 1860?1918 provides wide-ranging new perspectives on patient narratives and women's participation in surgery between 1860 and 1918. This title is also available as Open Access.

Acknowledgments; List of charts and tables; List of illustrations; Introduction: disapproval, curiosity, amusement, obstinate hostility? Women and surgery, 1860–1918; 1. From controversy to consolidation: surgery at the New Hospital for Women, 1872–1902; 2. The experiences of female surgical patients at the Royal Free Hospital, 1903–13; 3. Women surgeons and the treatment of malignant disease; 4. Inside the theatre of war; 5. Operating on the Home Front, 1914–18; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Claire Brock is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts at the University of Leicester. She is the author of two monographs, The Feminization of Fame, 1750–1830 (2006) and The Comet Sweeper (2007), and the editor of New Audiences for Science: Women, Children, and Labourers (2013). Brock won the British Society for the History of Science's international Singer Prize for young scholars (2005) and received a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award (2012–14) for British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 1860–1918.