Surgery and Anatomy

Body & Society
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The Spectre of the Scalpel: The Historical Role of Surgery and Anatomy in
Conceptions of Embodiment
Julie Doyle
Body & Society 2008 14: 9
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X07087528
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02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 9
The Spectre of the Scalpel: The

Historical Role of Surgery and
Anatomy in Conceptions of
Embodiment
JULIE DOYLE
. . . [that] in these days, and in this metropolis, and for an object [anatomy] so interesting and
essential to the public weal, no adequate provision should yet be made which is not stigma-
tised by illegality, and by constantly laying us [surgeons] open to the artifices and impositions
of low and degraded men is a defect in our jurisprudence, which, we trust, the growing good
sense and consideration of the public will not long suffer to continue. (Chevalier, 1823)
[Surgeons’] public image . . . notwithstanding occasions when particular surgeons’ performance
has been criticised, remains rosy. Surgical operations may be dramatic and those who perform
them acquire a certain glamour. (The Lancet, 1999)
Nearly 200 years separate these contrasting views regarding the British public’s
perception of surgeons and their surgical treatment of the body. The public disre-
gard for surgeons and their practice in the early 19th century is antithetical to the
elite position that surgeons currently occupy within medicine. Their treatment
of the body through cutting, which involves ‘an abrupt anatomical change’ (The
Lancet, 1999: 1373), is seldom questioned as an inappropriate means of dealing
with illness and disease. Indeed, the increasing normalization of cosmetic surgery
Body & Society © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore),
Vol. 14(1): 9–30
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X07087528
www.sagepublications.com
02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 10
10 ■ Body & Society Vol. 14 No. 1
in recent years certainly contributes to the glamour associated with surgeons and
the acceptability of their practices.1 Even in more obvious instances of physical
alteration through surgery, such as in gender reassignment, conjoined twins
surgery and, most recently, ‘weight loss surgery’, cutting and reshaping the body
in order to make it and the person ‘healthy’ is largely considered acceptable. Yet
up to the late 18th and early 19th centuries surgeons were deemed medically and
socially inferior to physicians – the elite medical profession at the time – and were
regarded with public revulsion. This was related, in part, to the fact that surgeons
based their medical practices upon practical knowledge of anatomy, acquired
through dissection. As the surgeon Chevalier noted, the state’s lack of provision
of legitimate bodies for anatomical dissection served to reinforce public abhor-
rence of surgeons as ‘low and degraded men’ in its failure to recognize the
importance of dissection for the development of surgery as a science.2 Further-
more, surgeons’ approach to the body and illness as anatomically observable and
treatable through cutting was in contrast to that of physicians – and therefore the
dominant medical orthodoxy – who regarded illness as an inaccessible, internal
disorder not locatable in one part of the body.3 Thus, what defines the differences
between current and past perceptions of surgery is a history of the development
of surgery as a medical science that comprises the changing ontology of the human
body and its medical management. Put simply, it is a view of the body as anatomic,
and thus surgically manageable that signifies the change in perceptions of surgery,
and medical practices, over this 200-year span.
Through an examination of the coterminous developments of surgery and
anatomy in Britain from 1750 to 1850, this article will illustrate how the develop-
ing discourses and practices of both anatomy and surgery were co-dependent for
the promotion of each as scientific disciplines.4 These imbricated developments,
I argue, were intrinsic to the promotion of surgery as a legitimate discipline of
science and to dominant conceptualizations of the body as anatomically knowable
and surgically manageable. The scientific discourse of anatomy, which seeks to
legitimize subjectivity through recourse to the biological body, has been criti-
cized by many feminist and cultural historians (Gatens, 1996; Jordanova, 1989;
Schiebinger, 1993). The Cartesian view of subjectivity as a mind and body split,
has been shown to be premised upon gendered and raced categorizations of
difference. Here, the mind is conceived as the locus of rational, masculine
consciousness, while the body is the feminized and racialized object of inquiry.
This split means that ‘the knowing subject is disembodied, detached from
corporeal “raw material”’ (Shildrick, 1997: 13–14): a gendered view of subjec-
tivity promulgated by the discourses and practices of a male-dominated medical
science, where the female body is over-invested as a site of scientific inquiry and

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The Spectre of the Scalpel ■ 11
of sexual difference (Newman, 1996; Petersen, 1998; Petersen and Regan de Bere,
2006; Schiebinger, 1993). As Thomas Laqueur (1990) has argued, the move from
a one-sex model to a two-sex model of sexual difference from 1750 onwards was
premised upon perceived incommensurable anatomical differences between
women and men, as the anatomical body – and the reproductive female body in
particular – was placed as the locus of sexed identity.5 Feminist critiques of the
science of anatomy have thus already revealed the gendered and racialized nature
of the discourse of anatomy, and its centrality to modern concepts of subjectivity
and embodiment. However, within the history of embodiment, the historical role
of surgery and of surgeons as practitioners has received very little critical atten-
tion. This article places surgery as central to an understanding of the develop-
ment of modern conceptions of embodiment as these have been premised upon
an anatomical body.
In place of a Cartesian medicalized model, current theorists of embodiment
seek to understand the complex interplay between the materiality of the body
and the psyche in the (ongoing) construction of subjectivity, and the mediating
role of cultural discourses within this relation. Moira Gatens employs the term
‘imaginary body’ to refer to ‘those images, symbols, metaphors and representa-
tions which help construct various forms of subjectivity’, arguing that ‘it is the
imaginaries of a specific culture: those ready-made images and symbols through
which we make sense of social bodies . . . which determine, in part, their value,
their status, and what will be deemed their appropriate treatment’ (Gatens, 1996:
viii). This article argues that surgery as a set of discourses and practices is imbri-
cated in the production of anatomy and, hence, subjectivity. In doing so, it argues
that surgical discourse and practice is inscribed within the cultural imaginaries
through which we make sense of embodied subjectivity.
Surgery was, and continues to be, a predominantly male profession whose
culture is masculine (Cassell, 1998; Katz, 1999; Pringle, 1998). The historical
centrality of surgery to the science of anatomy illustrates the gendered and
masculinist basis upon which modern conceptions of embodiment have been
premised. Elsewhere, I have examined in more detail the role of the pregnant
female body – dissected and imaged – in the developing discourses of surgery and
anatomy (Doyle, 2006), and the role of surgery within the gendered construction
of sexual difference through anatomy (Doyle, 2007). This article will thus focus
in more detail upon the historical figure of the male surgeon and ‘his’ search for
professional status within the context of British medicine, and a changing body
politic, during the period 1750–1850. It charts the changing nature of disease as
this was recast by surgeons through anatomical structures, which reorganized
conceptions of subjectivity in the process. To think of the body as anatomic is to

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 12
also think of the body as being surgically manageable – they historically and
ontologically presuppose each other. This materializes in the two ‘apparently
contradictory, yet intimately related perspectives’ of ‘the body in western
culture’, as Margrit Shildrick explains, where one is ‘cut off . . . established as a
whole and bounded’, the other ‘is increasingly cut open, breached, treated in
parts and reorganized’ (2008: 31). To conceive of the body, and subjectivity, as
both whole and (always potentially) fragmented is to understand it through
recourse to the (imaginary) interventions of the surgical knife. An historically
situated account of the development of anatomical and surgical science will thus
give some insight into how these seemingly contradictory views of the body are
emergent with an anatomic view of the body, and subjectivity, as this has been
constructed though surgical discourse and practice.
Medical Knowledge in 18th-century Britain – Physicians, Surgeons and Disease

In order to trace the changing conception of the human body during the course
of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, an understanding of the institutional
structures and orthodoxies of 18th-century medicine is required. Through the
treatment of disease we can understand how conceptions of the body are inextric-
ably linked with specific medical practices and the social status of practitioners.
During the 18th century, medicine comprised three different professions: physi-
cians (who diagnosed disease), surgeons (who cut the body) and apothecaries
(who dispensed drugs) (Lawrence, 1994; Porter, 1999). Physicians formed the
elite group, having been granted the status of the Royal College of Physicians in
1518, and were a small group numbering approximately 500 in 1780, compared
to ‘5,000 surgeons and apothecaries’ (Robb-Smith, 1966: 51).
Unlike surgeons and apothecaries, who learned through apprenticeship, physi-
cians were university trained (at Oxford and Cambridge, or at Scottish or conti-
nental universities, such as Paris and Leiden)6 and book-learned, enjoying the
social privileges and status that came with such a gentlemanly education. Jewson
notes that ‘an academic background ensured that those entering upon the
profession were scholars and gentlemen. By their deportment, manners and attire
physicians assiduously sought to maintain this standing in their professional
lives’ (1974: 374). Eighteenth-century conceptions of the gentlemen were based
upon ‘politeness’, which involved ‘mastering’ the arts of conversation within
mixed-sex groups, self-restraint and civility (Fletcher, 1995; Tosh, 2005). The
English gentleman was from the upper classes, and learned about gentlemanly
conduct from published advice books (Fletcher, 1995). The Grand Tour was one
of the means by which young men from elite society acquired gentlemanliness,

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 13
as well as through attendance at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This

liberal education was costly and demanded a certain amount of wealth (Jewson,
1974), helping to maintain the medical and social boundaries between the gentle-
manly physicians, and the surgeons and apothecaries.
Professional medical boundaries manifested in physicians’ treatment of a
patient’s illness and disease. Bodily boundaries were maintained as a physician
rarely touched a patient’s body, not only because of sexual morality, but also
because of the characterization of disease and the nature of diagnosis during this
period. Disease was not perceived to be localized in one part of the body, but
was diagnosed according to an elaborate classificatory system, called nosology,
which read patients’ external symptoms, unaided by instruments, as evidence of
a range of possible internal diseases (Jewson, 1974). In The Birth of the Clinic,
Foucault characterizes this reading of symptoms as constituting the sign of the
disease:
The symptom – hence its uniquely privileged position – is the form in which the disease is
presented: of all that is visible, it is the closest to the essential; it is the first transcription of the
inaccessible nature of the disease. (1997: 90)
Read externally, the symptom is the sign, to be interpreted by the physician: ‘the
sign announces . . . it does not offer anything to knowledge; at most it provides
a basis for recognition’ (1997: 90). Based upon a perceived imbalance in the four
humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile), as identified in Galenic
and Hippocratic medicine, a patient’s condition – the symptom and sign – was
deduced as ‘a combination of errors of various sorts’, where ‘faults in constitu-
tion, inheritance, diet, bowel habits, sexual activities, exercise, sleeping patterns
and so forth were described as combining to produce disease’ (Lawrence, 1994:
11). Hence, medical discourse and practice was dominated by the view propagated
by physicians, assigning them power and authority in the diagnosis and treat-
ment of illness and disease.7 This authority was further supported by the close
relationship that physicians had with upper-class gentlemen, in terms of their
patronage and also as a profession which provided occupations for many sons of
the ruling class (Jewson, 1974).
The conception of disease as inaccessible, non-localized disorder, read exter-
nally, without the need for instruments, meant that the body remained (psycho-
logically) whole and physically untouched by physicians. Surgeons were left to
perform minor repairs such as ‘blood-letting, lancing boils, dressing skin abrasions,
pulling teeth, managing whitlows, trussing ruptures, treating skin ulcers’ (Porter,
1999: 277), alongside more invasive and gruesome operations, performed without
anaesthesia or asepsis, such as amputations or removal of tumours.8 Cutting into

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the body was the secondary outcome of the physicians’ primary diagnosis and
was not a practice that was held in high regard. The surgical instruments – saw
and scalpel/knife – signified the manual basis of surgery and thus its low status
as a craft. Indeed, up until 1745 surgeons had shared their company with barbers,
some surgeon-barbers combining the skills of cutting both the hair and the body.
Surgeons’ training reinforced this manual view of surgery through the system
of apprenticeship, as surgeons followed the techniques and practices of senior
surgeons in order to obtain their surgical diploma. Unlike physicians, who were
organized through their Royal College in London, surgeons belonged to local
corporations, with the ‘grandest of these corporations . . . in London and Edin-
burgh’ (Lawrence, 1994: 12), but without the prestige and organizational structure
of a Royal College. Some pupils paid for private anatomy classes to supplement
their practical training.9
The lack of surgical training in anatomy and dissection was due in part to the
prevailing view of disease as non-localized disorder discernible only by physicians,
where anatomy was not important. The non-physical approach to the body exer-
cised by physicians reinforced the belief that cutting into the body was manual
work, not gentlemanly or scientific, and was also an unseemly bodily intervention
associated with the despised practices of dissection. Yet the view that anatomy
and dissection was not an appropriate scientific endeavour was being challenged
by some British surgeons during the middle of the 18th century. The surgeon-
obstetrician William Hunter (1718–83) set up the first British Anatomy School
in Covent Garden, London, in 1746, having witnessed dissection in the continen-
tal universities of Paris and Leiden where he studied.10 Thirty years earlier,
William Cheselden (1688–1752), the ‘most famous surgeon of his day’, had given
private anatomy lessons in his home in London (Moore, 2005: 38). However,
Hunter’s private anatomy school marks the beginning of a concerted effort by
surgeons to promote anatomy as central to the practice of surgery and scientific
knowledge. It also signals the increasing commercialization and entrepreneurial-
ism of medicine, particularly surgery, and the commodification of the anatomized
body through the purchase and dissection of dead bodies in the production of
scientific knowledge.11
Given the low medical and public prestige assigned to surgery, surgeons
needed to resignify surgery as a scientific practice, and anatomy as exemplary of
scientific knowledge. This was carried out in a variety of ways: (1) through the
promotion of anatomy as a science, distinct from and superior to physic; (2)
through the refiguration of the surgeon as both scientist and gentleman; (3) in the
promulgation of surgery as of public benefit and; (4) by means of state legislation
in terms of provisions for dissection and the institutionalization of the surgical

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 15
profession. These processes were interconnected and were coextensive with

broader social and political changes during the period 1750–1850 with regard
to increasing state intervention in the daily lives of the British public and the
developments of science in general. However, my specific focus upon the develop-
ments of surgery during this period is intended to illustrate the important role
that surgeons played in the development of an anatomical view of the body and
the surgical management of this form as representative of scientific knowledge
and practice. My intention is to be attentive also to the anxieties which underpin
surgical discourses of the body as they are played out in the various appeals by
surgeons for scientific validation.
Surgery and Anatomy – Changing Discourses of the Body

Around the time William Hunter opened his private Anatomy School in 1746,
surgeons were beginning to promote anatomy as central to their practice, and
to science. This promotion occurred through anatomical atlases and through
rhetorical exegesis. Anatomical atlases had a long history within developments
of medicine and science. Andreas Vesalius’ famous text, De Humani Corporis
Fabrica (1543), inaugurated the production of ‘scientific’ anatomical texts. The
illustrated anatomized body, cut and flayed, represented the human body,
although it was not until the mid to late 18th century that anatomical illustrations
began to signify as unmediated signs of anatomic knowledge rather than second-
order representations (McGrath, 2002). William Hunter’s collection of engravings
of the (dead) pregnant female body, published in his obstetrical atlas, Anatomy of
the Human Gravid Uterus (1774), was instrumental in placing anatomical illus-
trations, and female anatomy, as central to scientific knowledge, based upon the
‘evidence’ shown by the anatomical structures of the illustrated body. Much
critical work has already focused upon an analysis of Hunter’s atlas,12 and it is
therefore not my intention to analyse it here, or the two other British obstetrical
atlases produced during this period (see Doyle, 2006; McGrath, 2002; Roberts and
Tomlinson, 1992). While I acknowledge their importance within the construction
of an anatomical view of the body, and in the gendered organization of sexual
difference through female anatomy – which functioned to instantiate the gendered
mind/body split of Cartesian subjectivity – this article will analyse more closely
the accompanying discourses deployed by surgeons during this period in their
efforts to rid anatomy of its association with manual practice and elevate it to a
‘gentlemanly’ science: a move which was highly gendered and classed.
Public opposition to the practices of dissection was profound: cutting into the
dead body violated the integrity of the person’s identity and soul, according to

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Christian precepts (Richardson, 1987). Public revulsion understandably extended

to perceptions of surgical practice, and this was not helped by the association of
surgeons with body snatching. An anonymous caricature of 1782 entitled ‘The
Resurrection: or an Internal View of the Museum in Windmill Street on the Last
Day’ (Figure 1) articulates the fears concerning body snatching and dissection as
a violation of the sanctity of the dead body. The scene depicts William Hunter’s
house in Windmill Street, where he moved his anatomy school in 1768, and his
collection of anatomical specimens. Hunter is the figure in the middle, surrounded
by reanimated corpses and skeletons with various body parts missing – having
being removed and prepared as specimens for Hunter’s museum.13 One figure
holds a limb in his hand, while other limbs, bones and a skull are scattered on
the floor amid empty specimen jars. The figures demand their body parts back.
The second figure on the left who holds a leg cries, ‘What this! Arrah be easy
dear devil burn me if it be not my own I know it by the lump on the shin here.’
The figure next to this claims the leg as his own: ‘Damn me Sir that’s my leg’,
while another shouts, ‘Where’s my head?’ A female figure, standing next to the
right of Hunter, begs the surgeon to ‘restore me to my Virgin-honour did I keep
it inviolated 75 years to have it corked up at last’: the charge here seemingly being
the removal of her womb. The resurrection day is the moment when ‘men will
rise again to be judged’ (Figure 1), which demands that the resurrected body be
whole, else the soul will be damned.
Figure 1 The Resurrection (1782)

Source: Wellcome Library, London

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 17
Satirizing the violation of Christian beliefs, the image also articulates anxieties
over an emerging view of the body as anatomically fragmented and surgically
dismembered – a body (and identity) in parts. Such is the normalization of the
Cartesian model of subjectivity as mind/body split that it is not difficult for indi-
viduals in contemporary Western societies to conceptualize their bodies as whole,
but also made up of individual anatomical parts – a ‘body-in-pieces’ (Wegenstein,
2006: 3). This conception of the body is supported by the proliferation and
availability of medical images of body parts, particularly in cyberspace (Moore
and Clarke, 2001; Treichler et al., 1998). During the late 18th century, however,
a medicalized (surgical) discourse of the body was in the process of being formed.
This was supported over the course of the 19th century by the secularization of
society and a reconfiguration of the individual as in contract with the state and
its institutions (such as medicine), rather than God – developments I will return
to later. To the audience at the time then, the figures in ‘The Resurrection’ violate
Christian doctrine through an emerging anatomico-surgical discourse of the
body, which cuts the body in order to discover and reveal its knowledges.
The idea of cutting the dead body in order to extract its ‘truths’ required
considerable proselytization by surgeons in order to assuage public concern
and, more importantly, to establish themselves within the medical hierarchy as
credible practitioners. Given the dominance of gentlemanly physicians, surgeons
needed to present their practices as essential to scientific endeavour by counter-
ing the charge that what they did was manual labour. The manual labour involved
in dissecting was articulated as wholly necessary to the successful practice of
surgery as a science. Mindful of the dominant position of physicians, surgeons
sought to differentiate their own practices through anatomy.
A comparatively general knowledge of the anatomy of the human body may be sufficient for
a Physician. . . . The rest it will be enough for him to have seen repeatedly dissected. But the
hands of the Surgeon must be constantly employed in this work. He ought to bare every part
of this complicated machine, and all the relative situations of each, as accurately in his mind,
as the painter or the sculptor should its outline and general proportions. (Chevalier, 1797: 67)
The practical aspect of anatomy involved a figuration of scientific knowledge

as attainable through observation of the anatomical structures of the body.
Observation, however, required the skills of the surgical knife in revealing these
‘self-evident’ structures. Thus, while scientific knowledge was inscribed in the
tissues and matter of anatomy, the expertise of the surgeon’s scalpel and ‘his’ eyes
were needed to reveal and describe them, including the artists responsible for
their illustration. Surgery, it was argued, was based upon anatomical ‘fact’ – the
observable materiality of the body – while physic was based upon speculation
and imagination.
02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 18
. . . physiology is so bewitching a thing, that it is very apt to take up too great a proportion of
the attention of students; especially of such as possess a lively and warm imagination. So that
I would rather caution you against too hastily attempting to become physiologists. Be
anatomists first . . . if you amuse yourselves too early by indulging physiological speculations,
you will find you are getting on enchanted ground; your attention will be diverted from facts;
real substances and things will escape your notice and you will become theorists, but not prac-
titioners. (Chevalier, 1801: 13, my emphasis)
Anatomy was the basis of ‘fact’ and ‘real substances’. Materiality that could be
both handled and seen constituted this new scientific approach to understanding
the body and its diseases.
Yet, while surgeons sought to define their practice as scientific through the
materiality of human anatomy, which necessarily involved cutting – for dissection
and surgical practice – they also had to redefine their ‘mechanical art’ as scientific
by way of a discourse of gentlemanly pursuit and intellect. Given the high social
status that physicians were afforded due to their liberal education and rigorous
maintenance of bodily boundaries – between patient and physician – in the
diagnosis of disease, surgeons needed to acculturate some of this status through
the propagation of their own practice as worthy of gentlemen. Thus, as well as
promoting anatomy as a science of surgery based upon empirical facts, surgeons
also presented their practice, and themselves, as involving the mind, particularly
through the application of judgement. The characteristics of a surgeon were:
A sound understanding, a keen eye, a steady hand, and an intrepid mind are qualifications of
great importance. (Chevalier, 1801: 5)
Youth dexterity, acute sensation, sound judgement, and humanity, are the qualifications which
may be considered as necessary for a surgeon. (Justamond, 1789: 54)
In the application of the scalpel, and in the acquisition of anatomic-scientific

knowledge, the surgeon needed to employ his hands, his eyes and his mind.
Surgery was not merely mechanical, but involved the deliberations and judge-
ment of the surgeon. While promoted as scientific truth, this truth was depen-
dent upon the embodied characteristics of the surgeon, characteristics that could
be deemed masculine.14
The late 18th century witnessed a period of change with regard to the meaning
of English masculinity – a term whose first recorded use was in 1748 (Fletcher,
1995). While it is difficult to identify the exact meanings of masculinity during
this period, historians are in general agreement that there was a shift away from
the notion of gentlemanliness towards manliness, most discernible in the early
to mid-Victorian period (Fletcher, 1995; Tosh, 1999, 2005). Politeness, central to
sociability and the preserve of the upper classes, was gradually being usurped by

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 19
the concept of manliness, more suited to the emergent mercantile and commercial
men of the middle classes. Manliness was characterized by ‘energy, virility and
strength’ as well as ‘decisiveness, courage and strength’ (Fletcher, 1995: 87). This
marked a move from masculinity based on outward appearance and sociability,
to an internalized discourse of interiority and individualism – the modern
understanding of subjectivity, and of sexual difference. During this period, the
characteristics identified by the surgeons occupy the boundary point between
gentlemanliness and manliness. Manly qualities such as decisiveness and strength
are clearly identified as surgical skills, while the intellect and the mind – preserves
of the gentleman – are also invoked. Surgeons thus embodied different versions
of masculinity that were specifically classed. As an emerging profession, both
versions needed to be promulgated: gentlemanliness as a means of accessing
existing structures of power and authority with regard to liberal education,
intellect and patronage; and manliness for the resignification of the manual aspect
of surgery as specifically scientific. Surgery was thus an inherently gendered and
classed practice whose meanings were being created in relation to changing
significations of masculinity, class, identity and the body over the course of the
19th century.
The professional aspirations of surgery to be considered a science worthy of
gentlemen, rather than a mechanical art, were enhanced by the work of John
Hunter (1723–93), William’s younger brother. John Hunter’s contribution to
scientific surgery was through experimentation and research, physiological investi-
gation, and the meticulous recording of observations and results. An assiduous
dissector, his work covered gun-shot wounds, inflammation, venereal disease,
pathology, comparative and human anatomy; he was also a prolific collector of
human and animal specimens – now housed in the Hunterian Museum at the
Royal College of Surgeons of England (Irving, 1993; Royal College of Surgeons
of England, 1993). His research techniques and practice were extolled by his
contemporaries and surgeons who succeeded him. An annual Hunterian Oration
was established by the Royal College of Surgeons in February 1813 and continues
to this day. This enabled the surgical profession to performatively reinscribe
Hunter as the father of scientific surgery and as a man of genius, the person who
‘did more than anyone to make us Gentlemen’ as remarked by one of his pupils
(Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1993: 1). Roy Porter notes that ‘the
junior Hunter symbolized, for later practitioners, the arrival of surgery as physic’s
peer’ (1999: 280).
The success of John Hunter as surgeon represents changes occurring in medical
theory and power. Physicians were part of the elite because ‘of their close associ-
ation with, and membership of, the ruling class’ (Jewson, 1974: 375). They were

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 20
reliant upon their wealthy patients to judge their competency, effectively giving
the power of medical knowledge to the gentlemanly and genteel upper classes,
upon whose patronage physicians were dependent. Surgery, on the other hand,
developed without this close relationship to the upper classes. The Hunter
brothers had ‘relatively humble beginnings with limited connections’ (Moore,
2005: 19), but both managed to achieve considerable fame and success. Where
William was ‘a shrewd and ambitious social climber’ (2005: 18), his brother John
was less concerned with social hierarchies, although he did set up a private practice
and was engaged to a society heiress (Moore, 2005). The fact that both achieved
considerable success illustrates the early stages of changes to medical orthodoxy
and medical power, through the ascendance of an anatomico-surgical view of
disease and its treatment, and of the ability of ‘men’ to rise above their beginnings;
a characteristic of an emerging mercantile middle class in the late 18th century.
Yet tensions were endemic to these changes. Surgeons were keen to invoke the
intellect and authority of the gentleman in their presentation of scientific objec-
tive knowledge. One particular Hunterian Oration (1824) used Shakespeare’s
poetry to draw comparisons between the poet’s mind and that of the surgeon
Hunter. Anticipating objections to the use of ‘the figurative language of poetry’
to describe the genius of the surgeon, the orator Henry Cline (1750–1827), a
former pupil of Hunter’s, claims that the powers of mind required for poetry,
sculpture and painting apply equally ‘to the sciences in which the same powers
of mind are exerted, though in a different direction’ (1824: 577). Thus tensions
between art and science, imagination and fact, as well as factors of class – the
privileged intellectual gentleman versus the commercial rational man – under-
pinned surgical discourse and practice.
Of Benefit to All: Institutionalization, Colonial Endeavours and an Emerging

Body Politic
[I]n order to keep up the vigour and perfection of any science, it must be permitted to hold
out the usual encouragements for men of talents and property to devote themselves to it. These
encouragements are rank and fortune. The latter is given by the public to such as are honoured
with confidence, but the former can only be given by the high orders of the State for they only
have it to bestow. (Chevalier, 1797: 61)
Surgery also sought to legitimize its practices through state legislation, in terms
of institutional professionalization and in the legal provision of bodies for dissec-
tion. The arguments presented for both of these were based upon discourses of
public and state benefit. In 1797 a Bill was brought into Parliament for creating
the Corporation of Surgeons of London into a College. College status would

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 21
enable the surgical profession to acquire the institutional status that had been
afforded to physicians since 1518 and was considered a crucial step in the
professionalization of surgery as a medical science, both in the eyes of the state
and the public. To augment the campaign for legislation, surgeons constructed an
idealized and patrilineal history of surgery. Paying homage to William Chesleden
and William Smellie (1697–1763) as the founding fathers of English surgery and
obstetrics respectively, in 1789 J.O. Justamond, surgeon to Westminster Hospital,
London, stated the importance of tracing the origins of surgery as ‘the first
necessary step in the pursuit of any science’ (1789: 3). In the assertion of this
history, Justamond wrote:
In the primary ages of mankind, when the most perfect of all created beings had yet scarce
degenerated from that state of perfection in which he was first produced from the hands of the
creator, disease was yet unknown upon the earth. . . . His mind was not yet weakened by
intemperance, nor his body impaired by debauchery . . . but even in those happy times, man
was not yet exempt from the consequences of accidental violence. His body was not less
exposed to common casualties and to a variety of strokes that might bruise or wound his flesh,
or dislocate or fracture his bones. . . . Thus it appears that Surgery was incontestably the most
ancient branch of medicine, the parent of all the rest. (1789: 46)
Justamond promulgates a discourse of religious morality to describe the moral

degeneration of the human body and mind since its Godly creation, but posits
surgery as the ancient healer of the body both before and after moral degenera-
tion, i.e. the original sin committed by Adam and Eve. Surgery is thus inscribed
in the history of (Christian) humankind and medicine in a manner that subscribes
to religious doctrine, but at the same time presents surgery as a science of the
body, beyond religion.
The discourse of degeneration is linked to the discourse of race emergent during
a period when racial (and sexual) difference was being articulated and defined
through the projects of science (particularly natural history) and colonization.
These contributed to the reconception of race as a hierarchy of visible bodily
difference (Schiebinger, 1993).15 Surgery was implicated in this process through
the discourse of anatomy. The sexualization of the black female body in popular
discourse led to the infamous dissection of Saartjie Baartman, the ‘Hottentot
Venus’, by the French surgeon and anatomist Cuvier in 1815 (Fausto-Sterling,
2001). Displayed as a curiosity in life by virtue of her large buttocks and her
imagined-to-be enlarged genitalia (which remained hidden until her death),
Baartman was dissected in death in order for Cuvier to find the ‘truth’ of her
genitalia and thus of her racial difference.16 Surgery and anatomy were thus an
integral part of the material and psychological processes of nation-building
occurring through British colonial expansion, with surgeons placing the body at

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 22
its centre. Chevalier specifically relates the practice of surgery to the consoli-
dation of British imperial power.
It should be remembered that the benefits of those improvements in Surgery which have been
made in this country, are by no means confined within our own borders. They have extended
to foreign climes and have attracted pupils hither from all parts of Europe. And what is of more
importance for an English legislature to consider, is that they have reached the sister kingdom
and all the immense colonies of this extensive empire. In all these are to be found crowds of
sufferers, from the casualties of life, to the ravages of war, receiving solace, relief and restora-
tion, through the assistance of men, who owe their ability to impart these blessings, to the
labours, the instructions, and the example of the Surgeons of London. (1797: 49)
The term ‘ravages of war’ expunges British responsibility for the bloody exploits
of colonization and instead positions the British as saviours. The medical benef-
icence bestowed by surgeons upon ‘the immense colonies’ is also presented here
as a means of solace and relief, yet surgery was itself integral to the colonial
project. The casualties of colonial warfare presented surgeons with innumerable
opportunities for the practice of surgery, with many surgeons trained through
employment in the army, the Royal Navy and East India Company.
The figuration of surgery as part of British imperialism articulated national
rivalries between the colonial powers of Britain and France, while echoing similar
rivalries between surgeons and physicians. As a result of governmental support,
French surgery had developed more rapidly during the 18th century, particularly
morbid anatomy (Foucault, 1997). British surgery therefore sought to legitimize
its practices by deploying the discourses of imperialism to gain the support of
the British government. Such appeals also fed into the anxieties which under-
pinned colonial expansion. Anglo-French conflict in the North American colonies
had culminated in seven years of war from 1756, ending with French defeat in
1763. American independence in 1783, however, signalled that Britain was an
exhausted imperial power, having lost 13 colonies and accumulated a national
debt of £234 million (Hyam and Martin, 1975; Smith, 1998). While expansion in
Asia and the establishment of a penal colony at Botany Bay in 1786 laid the
foundations for a new era of British imperialism, continuing conflict with France
over the Dutch settlement in Southern Africa revealed the precarious state of
British sovereignty during the latter years of the 18th century. If the psychologi-
cal imperatives of imperial expansion were to exert power and control over non-
European land and people, then surgery can be understood to be part of this
desire to control and define, in this case the individual body as part of the body
politic of the nation.17 Concurrently, the discourse of manliness was increasingly
utilized to create national distinctions between the ‘effeminate’ French and the
‘manly’ English (Cohen, 1999).

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 23
The eventual establishment of the Royal College of Surgeons of London in

1800 (renamed the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1843) was a signifi-
cant moment in surgery’s professionalization. Although the Murder Act of 1752
still authorized only six bodies of murderers per year to be used for the purposes
of dissection,18 this practice received a degree of legitimation through the Charter’s
requirement that the College should:
. . . Purchase or provide a Proper Room House or Building, with suitable conveniences, within
400 yards, at the farthest, from the usual Place of execution for the County of Middlesex, or
the City of London, and the Suburbs thereof; for the purpose of more conveniently dissecting
and anatomising the bodies of such murderers as shall hereafter be delivered to them. (Royal
College of Surgeons, 1800: 14)
Attempts by surgeons to rid dissection of its association with barbarism were made
through reference to the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991) of the nation.
In one word, it being admitted that the science of Anatomy is in pre-eminent degree conducive
to the happiness of mankind, and also that dissection of subjects is the best means of acquiring
knowledge of science, it would be desirable to this end, that subjects should be obtained with
the least possible difficulty. . . . Government ought to exert itself to remove from the minds of
the people of all prejudices which have a tendency to destroy the general happiness of the
nation. (Shaw, 1823: 67)
The anatomical body as the object of surgical inquiry is figured as the responsi-
bility of, and of benefit to, the state. Like Chevalier’s representation of surgery
as beneficial to British imperial power, Shaw seeks to legitimize dissection as
being crucial to the well-being of the nation. In the Hunterian Oration of 1821,
Chevalier had made a similar appeal, defending the involvement of John Hunter
in the illegal business of body snatching on the premise that Hunter had to
‘contend not only with public prejudice, but even with the law itself’ (1823: 19).
The idea of the alleviation of suffering through civilization deployed by
imperialist discourse in the legitimation of the colonial project is also used by
surgeons in the validation of their own practices as of benefit to the British
public and the state. Such rhetoric contributed to the passing of the Anatomy
Act in 1832, which granted surgeons and anatomists specific rights to the use of
‘unclaimed’ paupers’ bodies for dissection: those who had died in institutions
such as the workhouse or hospital, or whose relatives could not afford funeral
costs (Richardson, 1987). The Act highlighted the increasing intervention of
medicine and the state as institutions of power and knowledge within the indi-
vidual and collective lives of the British people during a period of immense change
in Britain’s economic and social structures. The move from a predominantly
agricultural to industrial-based society led to major social unrest among those
who had been adversely affected by these alterations. This was accompanied by

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 24
massive population growth, from 7 million in England in 1800 to 17 million by

1850 (Robb-Smith, 1966). The mercantile and newly emergent middle classes,
which included surgeons, flourished within the new economic system. However,
as a social and economic identity in formation, the middle classes were fearful
of challenges towards their newly acquired cultural status, anxieties that were
projected through the notion of the disordered labouring masses.
Changes in the political and social economy of Britain, with the influence of
individualism, had profound effects upon thinking about poverty (Englander,
1998). The hardening of attitudes towards the poor was effected through the
formation of a centralized state system of (financial) relief, rather than, as had
previously been the case, it being under the jurisdiction of local parishes. Poor
Relief was increasingly viewed as a privilege rather than a right, reflected in the
Poor Law of 1834 which abolished outdoor relief for those deemed able-bodied,
with the assumption that these would enter the dreaded workhouses. The granting
of paupers’ bodies for dissection in the Anatomy Act reinforced these views. The
Act stated that anyone who wrote down their wishes not to be dissected after
death would be exempt, yet most of the poor would have been illiterate and
unable to legally authorize their opposition (Richardson, 1987). The wealthy were
protected from dissection while the poor had no rights over their own bodies; the
Anatomy Act thus marked the increased state and medical intervention in matters
of the body and life/death on the basis of class and economic distinctions.
The professional development of surgery as a distinct discipline of science was
enabled by specific legislative acts such as acquiring Royal College status (1800)
and the Anatomy Act (1832), as well as broader changes in the institutional
regulation of daily lives. Medical regulation, however, remained inconsistent. The
Apothecaries Act of 1815 operated as a licensing body for medical men who did
not have an MD, or for surgeons who did not have a Diploma from the Royal
College, but failed to affect the elite physicians and surgeons of the London
colleges, who continued to supervise their own qualifications (Lawrence, 1991).
Susan Lawrence (1991) points out that in February 1819, regulations for the
surgeons’ diploma from the Royal College of Surgeons were made more precise.
Each student was required to take two courses in anatomy, one in surgery, two
courses of dissection and to carry out twelve months’ surgical practice in a large
ward in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow or Dublin. As a result, private enterprise
(instigated by William Hunter’s Anatomy School) flourished in an effort to cater
for these new requirements.
In a letter to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1831, the surgeon John Henry
Green blamed the historical rivalries between surgeons and physicians for the
lack of a centralized system of medical training, and called for a general council

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 25
to be appointed to oversee medical education. However, Green was quick to re-

endorse the rivalries by contrasting ‘the showy hypotheses which have been the
bane of the jealous sister-science [physic]’ with the observations and experiments
of surgery, which have enabled it to be raised from ‘a mechanical art to the rank
of a liberal profession . . . in close alliance with all that most ennobles the intel-
lect of man’ (Green, 1831: 13). The status of ‘liberal profession’ that surgeons had
been campaigning for since the mid-18th century is shown here to be still fraught
with insecurities and anxieties. Green’s characterization of the practice of surgery
as comprising the intellect further demonstrates the two contradictory but inter-
related discourses promoted by surgeons in their endeavours to make their
practice scientific: first, the claims to the rational truth of anatomy as the basis of
scientific knowledge and, second, the practice of surgery as an intellectual and
gentlemanly pursuit ennobling the mind. In the eventual passing of the 1858
Medical Act, distinctions between surgeons and physicians were maintained,
paving the way for the ‘heroic’ operations of surgeons towards the latter end of
the 19th century, aided by anaesthetic (from 1846) and antisepsis (from 1867).
Furthermore, as the cult of manliness became a feature of middle-class masculin-
ity from 1850 onwards, the manly attributes of ‘physical courage, chivalric deals,
virtuous fortitude . . . military and patriotic virtue’ (Mangan and Walvin, 1987: 1)
looked increasingly like the attributes of the ‘heroic’ surgeon.
Normalizing the Anatomical Body of Surgery

The rise of surgery during the 19th century charts changes to the nature of disease
and the ontology of the body within science. Surgery’s promotion of anatomy as
the basis of scientific knowledge helped to redefine the anatomical body as the
site of medical inquiry, and was implicated in wider disciplinary mechanisms that
sought to define and regulate individual bodies through institutional surveillance,
as figured by the clinical gaze (Foucault, 1997). Foucault identifies the change
from the characterization of disease in 18th-century medicine to 19th-century
medicine as being the move from disease as unlocatable and unspecific – the
symptom as sign – to disease as locatable and definable by the clinician’s gaze:
the production of a normative body.
. . . to be seen and to be spoken, immediately communicate in the manifest truth of the disease
of which it is precisely the whole being. There is the disease only in the element of the visible
and therefore statable. (1997: 95)
The body understood as a visible compendium of signs of which the truth of being
(of identity) is inscribed, is dependent upon surgical technologies and procedures

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 26
which cut the body, making it simultaneously legible and surgically manageable.
Anatomical knowledge and surgical intervention go hand in hand and are funda-
mentally imbricated in the essentializing view of the body as the basis of subjec-
tivity, premised upon the Cartesian mind/body split.
The rise of an anatomical – and thus also surgical – view of the body was
aided by the changing nature of class and masculinity during the 19th century, as
the mercantile middle classes grew and ‘manliness’ began to succeed upper-class
gentlemanliness in dominant conceptions of masculinity. Thus, the manual labour
of surgery could be resignified as manly physical courage. Yet the rise of the lowly
surgeon to a ‘man’ of science drew upon both discourses of gentlemanliness
and manliness, upon art and science, in the formation of surgical identity, thus
demonstrating the tensions which underpinned surgical discourse.
Accompanying these developments was the inscription of the anatomical
body as the site of sexual and racial difference (Fausto-Sterling, 2001; Laqueur,
1990; Schiebinger, 1993). Nineteenth-century surgeons were central to the re-
definition of sexual and racial difference through the body (Doyle, 2006, 2007),
advocating surgery as a means of re-ordering and regulating perceived aberra-
tions. For example, hysterectomies and ovariotomies were used to control female
hysteria or nuerosy (Porter, 1999: 364). As the 19th century progressed, surgeons
gained increasing authority as narrators of the body and of its perceived differ-
ences. In response to Cuvier’s dissection of Saartjie Baartman in 1815, the British
surgeon W.H. Flower and physician James Murie dissected a ‘Bushwoman’
(actually a 12-year-old girl) in 1867. They found that ‘the remarkable develop-
ment of the labia minora, or nymphae, which is so general a characteristic of the
Hottentot and Bushman race, was sufficiently well marked to distinguish these
parts at once from those of any ordinary human species’; however, the dissection
revealed that the genitals ‘had not attained the extraordinary extent attributed to
them by most authors’ (Flower and Murie, 1867: 208). Tellingly, the imaginary
body exceeded its ‘reality’.
If embodiment is understood as ‘the irreducible imbrication of being-in-a
body’ (Shildrick and Price, 1998: 2), then history shows that the discourse and
practice of surgery is implicated in this being. To conceive of subjectivity as
definable and experienced through the body – a body understood as comprising
different organs and parts, as both whole and fragmented – is to experience the
body as a surgically defined form.19 Furthermore, if surgery is historically
implicated in the production of the anatomical body as a normative model of
subjectivity, then surgery is also the means by which normative notions of the
body and embodiment can be questioned. An understanding of the developing
discourses and practices of surgery and anatomy in the medical mediation of the
body is thus one way of critiquing the view of the body as a stable signifier, and
02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 27
of imagining new ways of inhabiting our bodies, and subjectivities, beyond the
normative spectre of anatomy and the surgical scalpel.
Acknowledgement
My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier version of the article.
Notes
1. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (2007) recently published figures for
procedures carried out in 2006, which showed a 31 percent increase on 2005; 92 percent of all cosmetic
surgery procedures are carried out on women.
2. Legally, the bodies of six murderers per year were allowed for the purposes of dissection,
following the 1752 Murder Act passed by King George II. This legislation changed in 1832 with the
introduction of the Anatomy Act, allowing surgeon-anatomists the use of the bodies of unclaimed
paupers (Richardson, 1987).
3. The diagnosis of illness and disease was based upon the physician’s analysis of the patient’s
symptoms as sign of the internal disorder. This view was shifting towards the end of the 18th century,
when morbid anatomy (in France) helped shift perceptions of disease to localized parts of the body.
This article will expand upon this view later on.
4. The primary research entailed examining printed surgical texts, printed anatomical texts and
journal articles from the period 1750–1850 in Britain.
5. For a critique of Laqueur’s simplification of pre-modern conceptions of sexual difference see
Park and Nye (1991).
6. For figures see Robb-Smith (1966). Full fellowships of the Royal College of Physicians were
only granted to those who had obtained a degree at Oxford or Cambridge. Those who obtained
Scottish or continental degrees were offered licentiates.
7. Dominant here refers to the prevailing view rather than the only one, as 18th-century medicine
was unregulated and incoherent at the best of times.
8. Anaesthesia in the form of ether was introduced in America in 1846 by W.T.G. Morton, a
Boston dentist. Antisepsis was made a routine practice for British surgery by Joseph Lister, who
published his findings on observing the results of antisepsis on patient mortality in 1867. For a
discussion of both see Porter (1999).
9. This was different in Paris, where morbid anatomy, involving physicians, was gaining promi-
nence, as Foucault examines in The Birth of the Clinic (1997). In Britain, however, morbid anatomy
did not develop; rather it was up to surgeons to promote anatomy in their attempts during the later
part of the 18th century to gain scientific credibility.
10. Wendy Moore’s excellent and evocative biography of the ‘father’ of scientific surgery, John
Hunter – William Hunter’s younger brother – also includes the story of William’s contribution to
surgery during this period (Moore, 2005).
11. Ruth Richardson (1987) has a chapter on the corpse as commodity.
12. In relation to the emergence of realism as a discourse of science see McGrath (2002); on the
scientific visualization of the reproductive female body see Newman (1996); and on the role of
anatomical illustrations of pregnancy in the professionalization of surgery see Doyle (2006).
13. Contemporary parallels can be drawn to the Alder Hey Children’s hospital (Liverpool, UK)
body parts scandal in 1999, when it was revealed that hearts and organs from hundreds of dead babies
and children had been kept for research purposes without the consent of the parents.
14. Through ethnography, Joan Cassell (1998) has examined the embodied practices of surgeons,
exploring the ways in which the masculinist structure of the surgical profession is negotiated by female
surgeons today.

02 Doyle 087528F 29/2/08 4:10 pm Page 28
15. Charles White, surgeon and former pupil of William Hunter, published An account of the regular
gradation in man and in different animals and vegetables, and from the former to the latter (1799).
The text figured racial difference as anatomically definable, represented through a visual hierarchy of
difference, starting at the top with the facial features of the ‘Grecian Antique’ sliding down to the
‘Negro’ at the bottom.
16. See Rachel Holmes (2007) for an evocative biography of Saartjie Baartman’s life and death.
17. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1968 [1651]) used the body as a metaphor to describe the political
organization of the 17th-century English commonwealth. Where the commonwealth represents ‘the
body politic’, the subdividing of this apparatus into its various systems and structures was, according
to Hobbes, analogous to the individual parts of the human body. Hobbes’ Leviathan articulates a
theological and political contract, which involves a collectively imagined English nation, representa-
tive of God’s people, and the subdivision of this nation into its constitutive parts, each of which
functions to maintain the law of the sovereign monarchy – the representative of God’s authority. The
late 18th and early 19th centuries saw a reorganization of the body politic, where the state was increas-
ingly perceived to be independent of the monarchy and with the constitution of the social contract
now between the individual and the state.
18. Contemporary resonances with the use of the bodies of criminals for dissection and anatomi-
cal imaging can be seen in the National Library of Medicine’s ‘The Visible Human Project’ (1994),
which created three-dimensional anatomical images of the complete male and female body. Where the
identity of the female body was kept confidential, the identity of the male body was revealed as Joseph
Paul Jernigan, a 38-year-old Texas man who had been sentenced to death for murder. See Cartwright
(1998) for a discussion of how Jernigan’s crimes were considered ‘redeemed’ by giving his body to
medical science.
19. The naming of body parts by surgeon-anatomists was another way in which the body, and
reproductive anatomy in particular, was inscribed by the surgeon and lives on through history. The
naming of female reproductive anatomy took place during the Renaissance, which included debates
about who was the first to ‘discover’ the clitoris (see Laqueur, 1990). My thanks to the anonymous
reviewer for reminding me of this aspect of the history of anatomy.
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Julie Doyle is a Principal Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Brighton,
UK. Her research interests include surgery and (gendered) embodiment, the visual culture of science
and the environment, and climate change communication. She has published in journals such as
Science as Culture, Social Semiotics and Women: A Cultural Review, and in edited collections such
as A. Booth and M. Flanagan (eds) Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture (MIT Press, 2002)
and S. Dobrin and S. Morey (eds) Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, and Nature (SUNY Press, forthcoming
2008). She is currently working on a book project examining the mediation of climate change.

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Body & Society

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The Spectre of the Scalpel: The

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Medical Knowledge in 18th-century Britain – Physicians, Surgeons and Disease

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as well as through attendance at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This

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profession. These processes were interconnected and were coextensive with