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.

This book explores the important connections between medicine and political culture that often have been overlooked. In response to the French revolution and British radicalism, political propagandists adopted a scientific vocabulary and medical images for their own purposes. New ideas about anatomy and pathology, sexuality and reproduction, cleanliness and contamination, and diet and drink migrated into politics in often startling ways, and to significant effect. These ideas were used to identify individuals as normal or pathological, and as “naturally” suitable or unsuitable for public life. This migration has had profound consequences for how we measure the bodies, practices and abilities of public figures and ourselves.

Exploring aspects of Irish medical history, from the nature and proposed remedies for various illnesses in eighteenth century Ireland, to the treatment of influenza in twentieth-century Ireland, this book shows how the cultures of medical care evolved over three centuries.

My original intention was to write a history of medical statistics, used in its prewar sense, expanding the writings on the subject by Major Greenwood, from which I formed many of my ideas in the early days immediately after the Second World War. In later years, I decided that the scope of his works was narrower than what I think is appropriate now, for he was writing in an era before the acceptance and use of the Fisherian methods and he was probably not aware of the mathematization of many parts of biological theory. Further, the boundary between the medical and biological sciences has largely disappeared. Many texts have now been written on branches of the theory and practice inspired by R. A. Fisher (see §4. 13). I discuss the history of the use of quantitative methods in the biological sciences, defined after the style of Peller (1967) as that branch of science that uses a quantitative approach to, or quantitative logical reasoning on, or biology. The mathematical tech any issue having to do with medicine niques are various and not classified here. Within the book I use "biological sciences" to include medicine but use the longer phrase in its title to avoid misunderstandings as to content. Moreover, most of the experimental work carried out in medical research laboratories is performed on animals other than man.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1898 Edition.