Doctors, Patients and Trust

There are a number of scholarly histories of surgery that detail who invented what when, but this is not that sort of history. Instead, this book asks why we trust surgeons, or rather, it asks how we have come to trust surgeons, because such trust has not always been there. In the 1890s, for instance, surgery still had many of the characteristics of a commodity. Patients and their friends made up their own minds whether and when and from whom they were going to buy it.  

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The Operations

The central section of the book asks exactly what kind of operations were contributing to the enormous growth in surgery and the answers are perhaps somewhat surprising. Using hospital records, surgical text books from the 1890s to the 1930s, and debates in contemporary medical journals, the procedures which became particularly popular in the early years of the twentieth century are examined, as well as operations which fell out of fashion. 

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The Patients

What sort of circumstances might lead someone to agree to surgery? What was it like to go ‘under the knife’ fifty or one hundred years ago? Why might people choose to have their surgery performed in their own home rather than in hospital and why did this change over the years? These are among the many questions addressed in the first three chapters, as surgery is placed in the broader context of patient’s lives. 

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The Surgeons

Surgeons are, like everyone else, fallible human beings, gendered and embodied themselves, just like their patients. They have home lives and social lives, as well as surgical careers. In the final section of the book, questions are asked about the culture within which so much technological and scientific innovation took place in the early twentieth century, in an attempt to understand why so many people were prepared to trust surgeons so much for so long. 

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