Belly-Rippers, Surgical Innovation and the Ovariotomy Controversy

by Sally Frampton

Overview

This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, while also remaining at the boundaries of ethical acceptability. This book traces the operation’s innovation, from its roots in eighteenth-century pathology, through the denouncement of those who performed it as ‘belly-rippers’, to its rapid uptake in the 1880s, when ovariotomists were accused of over-operating. Throughout the century, the operation was never a hair’s breadth from controversy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319786100
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	12/29/2018
Series:	Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
Edition description:	2018
Pages:	267
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sally Frampton is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, UK. She has previously published on surgery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the history of the medical press.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Introduction.- Chapter Two: Pathologies, Actions, Ideas.- Chapter Three: Representations of Practice.- Chapter Four: Patent Concerns, Unpatentable Procedures.- Chapter Five: The Business of Surgery.- Chapter Six: The Afterlife of an Operation.- Chapter Seven: Conclusion.