Creating a Surgical Controversy

AbstractChapter 3 brings together two medical innovations of the early nineteenth century which were to become deeply entangled: ovariotomy and the weekly medical press. This chapter focuses on the period between the 1830s and 1850s, a time during which the operation to remove diseased ovaries was given the appellation ‘ovariotomy’, and when the debate as to the justifiability of the operation was at its most polarised. For an increasingly vocal group of advocates, the operation was heralded as the beginning of a new era in surgery. For influential opponents, it was nothing more than a useless and possibly criminal procedure. The operation was subject from both its supporters and detractors to highly emotive ‘subjective’ accounts, which centred upon patient narratives, as well as to ‘objective’ statistical deconstructions.