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Overview
- Offers a history of the establishment and development of this controversial surgical practice
- Explores key ethical issues in nineteenth-century medicine and society
- Provides a new analytical framework – inclusive of gender – in which surgical innovation is the conceptual focal point
Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History (MBSMH)
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About this book
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.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
Authors and Affiliations
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Belly-Rippers, Surgical Innovation and the Ovariotomy Controversy
Authors: Sally Frampton
Series Title: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78934-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-78610-0Published: 15 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-78934-7Published: 30 December 2018
Series ISSN: 2947-9142
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9150
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 267
Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations, 5 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Science, Social History, History of Medicine, Abdominal Surgery, Gender Studies