A Shame and Medical History Seminar: Bodily Shame in Romantic Surgery

Dr Michael Brown, Lancaster University – ‘Bodily Shame in Romantic Surgery’

This seminar is part of the Shame and Medical History Seminar Series and is organised at the University of Exeter by the Wellcome Trust funded Shame and Medicine Project, and the Centre for Medical History.

A Shame and Medical History Seminar with Dr Michael Brown, Lancaster University.

‘Bodily shame in Romantic surgery’

This seminar explores the place of bodily shame in early nineteenth-century British surgery using the extensive archives of the leading London surgeon Astley Cooper (1768-1841). Cooper’s archive, held by the Royal College of Surgeons of England, contains hundreds of letters and case reports from and about a wide range of patients, suffering from a multitude of different conditions. As early nineteenth-century patients and surgeons both recognised, the curative capabilities of contemporary surgery were limited, as were its prophylactic powers. As such, patients often presented with what we today would regard as extreme and highly advanced manifestations of disease, and suffered under agonising bodily afflictions. This inescapable reality of pre-modern surgery produced complex attitudes towards the self and the body, not the least of which was shame. Patients regularly spoke of concealing their conditions, even from their closest loved ones, while surgeons lamented that patients would often present themselves for treatment only when it was too late. This seminar explores the early nineteenth-century patient’s complex relationship with their diseased body through the prism of the emotions and demonstrates how this relationship, as well as that between patient and surgeon, were structured by an emotional regime of Romantic sensibility.

Dr Michael Brown is a cultural historian of medicine, surgery, gender and war, with a special interest in politics, identities and the emotions. Between 2016 and 2021 he was Principal Investigator on the Wellcome Trust-funded project Surgery & Emotion, and his most recent monograph, Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) derives from that project. He is currently developing a new research project with Professor Joanne Begiato of Oxford Brookes University on an emotional and embodied history of the hand in Victorian Britain. In 2022 he joined Lancaster University, having previously worked at Roehampton, Manchester, Kent, and York.

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The event will be recorded and published on the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health YouTube channel, so by attending you acknowledge you may be recorded. To maintain privacy, you are welcome to join the meeting with video turned off.

If you would like to attend the event in person at the University of Exeter please register here.

If you have any questions, please contact info@shameandmedicine.org.