Historicising Surgery: Sex, Gender, Technology and the Surgical Imaginary

Abstract

The anatomical body figures as a privileged site in the signification of sexual difference. This paper argues that the historical discourses and practices of surgery are implicated in this figuration of the body as composed of sexually differentiated anatomical parts. Through historical analysis of the institutional and discursive developments of British surgery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the paper demonstrates how surgeons promoted an anatomical view of the body as representative of scientific, empirical knowledge. During this period, surgeons were deemed of lower medical and social status than physicians because, unlike physicians, surgeons physically touched the patient's body and were not university trained. In order to gain medical authority, surgeons thus had to resignify their practices (which included dissection) and approach to the body as illustrative of scientific knowledge, worthy of gentlemen. In contrast to the medical orthodoxy of physicians who diagnosed disease through external symptoms, surgeons attributed disease to the internal, material structures of the body and advocated surgical intervention as a means of medical management. In doing so, the human body was reconceived as an anatomical form, comprised of different parts to which surgeons have privileged access and knowledge. As this view gained legitimacy over the course of the nineteenth century, understandings about sexual difference became anatomically, and hence surgically, legitimised. This paper thus argues that the practices and discourses of surgery, and the surgeons implicated in its development, are instrumental in the historical production and ongoing reproduction of anatomy as a site of sexual significance.

Keywords:

• Surgery
• anatomy
• gender
• sex
• technology

Notes

¹See Biddy Martin ([1992] 1996) for an earlier (but still relevant) critique of the feminist separation of anatomical sex from social gender, and the subsequent fixity assigned to the body/sex within much queer theory as the result of a critical focus upon gender at the expense of sex, thereby ignoring the “complex relations between the body and psyche” (Martin [1992] 1996, 72).

²There have of course been numerous works by feminist/queer theorists that question the gender/sex distinction and the role of anatomy/the body in supporting this distinction. See Butler (1990, 1993), Fausto-Sterling (1992, 2000), Gatens (1996), Grosz (1994, 1995), and Martin ([1992] 1996).

³Royal and legal recognition for surgeons in France had already occurred in 1731, while surgeons’ societies in Edinburgh and Dublin had also been granted recognition as colleges rather than companies.

⁴See also Cassell (1998) for an analysis of the gendered embodiment of surgeons and surgical practice.