Lancaster University historian, Dr Michael Brown, has laid open a key period in the history of modern British surgery in a new book.

Emotions and Surgery is the culmination of a five-year Wellcome Trust Investigator Award and seeks to reshape historical understandings of the development of modern surgery through the conceptual prism of the emotions. It provides an emotional and embodied history of surgery before and after the introduction of anaesthesia and overturns well-established assumptions about surgery in the pre-anaesthetic era.

In the book, Dr Brown challenges the stereotype of the pre-anaesthetic surgeon as a callous, blood-stained butcher and instead introduces the concept of the 'Romantic surgeon', one who was steeped in a culture of emotional experience, expression, and intersubjectivity. Brown argues that emotions were not only central to the identity and experience of both surgeons and patients in this period, but that they also functioned as a vital mechanism for regulating bodily health and operative outcomes.

The first part of the book explores the elaboration of this ‘emotional regime’ of Romantic sensibility in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, while the second part examines its supersession by an emotional regime of scientific modernity, in which the emotions of surgeons and patients alike were increasingly marginalised and ultimately, with the triumph of antisepsis in the later nineteenth century, expunged from surgical thought and practice.

Emotions and Surgery is an open access publication and can be dowloaded for free on the Cambridge University Press website.