Description
Book SynopsisFor Fear of Pain offers a social history of the operating room in Britain during the final decades of painful surgery. It asks profound questions: how could surgeons operate upon conscious patients? How could patients submit? It presents a revisionist view of surgery, hygiene, nursing, military and naval surgery and the introduction of anaesthesia.
Trade Review”…an excellent and useful book.” - in: Wellcome History, Vol. 29, 2005 “…innovative historical focus […] eloquent descriptions […] More clearly than in any other historical account, Stanley delineates and substantiates the “inescapable tension” that surgeons faced…” - in: The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 78, 2004 “…a very valuable and interesting book.” - in: Health and History, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2003, pp.156-158 “…this book is a well-organized graphic account told with humility and intense feeling for all those facing ‘The Fear of Pain.’” - in: Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2004, pp.195-19
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Abbreviations Prologue Introduction: ‘Painful, difficult, bloody, tedious and dangerous’ 1 ‘Surgeons and operators’: The Surgeons’ World 2 ‘Modern surgeons’: Medical Knowledge and Surgery 3 ‘Capital operations’: Major Surgery 4 ‘A hard set of butchers’?: Wartime Surgery, 1793-1815 5 ‘In process of cure’: Hospitals and Surgical Healing 6 ‘Gennelmen!’: Medical Students 7 ‘The living subject’: Surgeons and Patients 8 ‘The cutting part’: In the Operating Room 9 ‘Our little patient’: Surgeons and Children 10 ‘Fortitude’: The Patient’s Experience of Surgery 11 ‘The rights of pain’: The Acceptance of Anaesthesia Epilogue ‘Long fixed in the memory’: The Legacy of Painful Surgery Image Credits Bibliography Index
