The introduction of anaesthesia to Victorian Britain marked a defining moment between modern medicine and earlier practices. This book uses new information from John Snow's casebooks and London hospital archives to revise many of the existing historical assumptions about the early history of surgical anaesthesia. By examining complex patterns of innovation, reversals, debate and geographical difference, Stephanie Snow shows how anaesthesia became established as a routine part of British medicine.

Among all the great discoveries and inventions of the nineteenth century, few offer us a more fascinating insight into Victorian society than the discovery of anaesthesia. Now considered to be one of the greatest inventions for humanity since the printing press, anaesthesia offered pain-free operations, childbirth with reduced suffering, and instant access to the world beyond consciousness. And yet, upon its introduction, Victorian medics, moralists, clergymen, and scientists, were plunged into turmoil. This vivid and engaging account of the early days of anaesthesia unravels some key moments in medical history: from Humphry Davy's early experiments with nitrous oxide and the dramas that drove the discovery of ether anaesthesia in America, to the outrage provoked by Queen Victoria's use of chloroform during the birth of Prince Leopold. And there are grisly ones too: frequent deaths, and even notorious murders. Interweaved throughout the story, a fascinating social change is revealed. For anaesthesia caused the Victorians to rethink concepts of pain, sexuality, and the links between mind and body. From this turmoil, a profound change in attitudes began to be realised, as the view that physical suffering could, and should, be prevented permeated through society, most tellingly at first in prisons and schools where pain was used as a method of social control. In this way, the discovery of anaesthesia left not only a medical and scientific legacy that changed the world, but a compassionate one too.

Originally published 1979 The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine looks at the discovery of inhalation anaesthesia in 1846, and how it began a new era in surgery. The book looks at James Young Simpson’s demonstration of the value of chloroform as an anaesthetic, and how many surgeons quickly adopted it. The book also looks at the dangers of chloroform if mishandled and only after considerable controversy and numerous fatalities was its use thoroughly understood and established. Ten years later an even more lengthy struggle began over antiseptic surgery. The ‘germ’ theory, on which Lister’s technique was founded had few adherents among British surgeons, and his methods were deemed absurdly complicated. He was opposed and sometimes ridiculed by the most distinguished men in the profession, including Simpson. Over ten years were required to persuade the majority of British surgeons that Lister did actually achieve the results which he claimed and that it was possible for a competent surgeon to do equally well, if only he would take the trouble. This book shows that a great many factors interacted in delaying the introduction of these new ideas. The almost wholly unscientific nature of British medical education and practice before 1860 or 1870, detailed in the first chapter, was one factor; rivalry and distrust between London and Scotland was another. Genuine disadvantages in the new methods were not unimportant either, while personal animosities failure to face the facts, and fear of the unknowable consequences of change all played a significant part.

This handbook covers the technical, social and cultural history of surgery. It reflects the state of the art and suggests directions for future research. It discusses what is different and specific about the history of surgery - a manual activity with a direct impact on the patient’s body. The individual entries in the handbook function as starting points for anyone who wants to obtain up-to-date information about an area in the history of surgery for purposes of research or for general orientation. Written by 26 experts from 6 countries, the chapters discuss the essential topics of the field (such as anaesthesia, wound infection, instruments, specialization), specific domains areas (for example, cancer surgery, transplants, animals, war), but also innovative themes (women, popular culture, nursing, clinical trials) and make connections to other areas of historical research (such as the history of emotions, art, architecture, colonial history). Chapters 16 and 18 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading midcentury novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. Examining the work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pratt-Smith explores how Victorian novelists attributed magical qualities to electricity, imbuing it with both the romance of the past and the thrill of the future. She concludes with a case study of Benjamin Lumley’s Another World, which presents an enticing fantasy of electricity’s potential based on contemporary developments. Ultimately, her book contends that writing and reading about electricity appropriated and expanded its imaginative scope, transformed its factual origins and applications and contravened the bounds of literary genres and disciplinary constraints.

The story of pain and suffering since the eighteenth century. Prize-winning historian Joanna Bourke charts how our understanding of pain (and how to cope with it) has changed completely over the last three centuries.

The Cancer Problem offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America. The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.