ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Against “Human Vivisection” – Women’s Rights Activists and Criticism of Surgery in Britain and the US, 1880s-1914

• In Event: The History of Distrust in Medical Science

English Abstract

By the 1880s surgeons performed ever more numerous and more invasive interventions to cure an increasing number of diseases in a radical way. The accelerated growth of surgery provoked reactions from a whole range of skeptics: cautious surgeons, mud-raking journalists, antivivisectionists, natural healers, etc. Women’s rights advocates were particularly vocal and often questioned the very principle of modern surgery – the treatment of complex internal diseases by local intervention which at the same time turn’s the patient’s into body the surgeon’s working material. Surgery on female genital organs, such as the ovaries, presented a special focus of much of the criticism of the time. Skeptics saw this surgery as a continuation of animal experiments on female subjects calling it “human vivisection” . I will explore the wider context of criticism of modern medicine and analyze how modern surgery was understood by its critics at a decisive point in its development. Reflecting the surgical developments of the time, these critical voices help shedding light on what modern surgery stood for in the gender politics of its historical context.

Author

• Thomas Schlich, McGill University