'The Days of Brilliancy are Past': Skill, Styles and the Changing Rules of Surgical Performance, ca. 1820-1920

Abstract

This paper examines how, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the appreciation of skill in surgery shifted in characteristic ways. Skill is a problematic category in surgery. Its evaluation is embedded into wider cultural expectations and evaluations, which changed over time. The paper examines the discussions about surgical skill in a variety of contexts: the highly competitive environment of celebrity practitioners in the amphitheatres of early nineteenth-century Britain; the science-oriented, technocratic German-language university hospitals later in the century; and the elitist surgeons of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States with their concerns about distancing themselves from commercialism and cheap showmanship. For analysing the interaction of surgical practices with their various contexts the paper makes use of the concept of 'performance' and examines how the rules of surgical performance varied according to the prevailing technical, social, and moral conditions. Over the course of the century, surgical performance looked more and more recognisably modern, increasingly following the ideals of replicability, universality and standardisation. The changing ideals of surgical skill are a crucial element of the complex history of the emergence of modern surgery, but also an illuminating example of the history of skill in modern medicine.

Keywords: Body History; History of Surgery; Performance; Skill.

Figure 1:

An example of the new form of the surgeon’s actor-role: Cushing operating before the Harvey Cushing Society; photograph, taken at some point 1929–32. Source: Harvey Cushing Photograph Collection, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Historical Library, Boston.