Gender and Surgery

by

Claire Brock

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0017

Introduction

The direct consideration of gender in the history of surgery is a recent phenomenon, although the gendering of surgery has been intrinsic to its social and cultural representation and public perception. It is still difficult to think of the surgical field outside gendered stereotypes, so ingrained are they within history and popular culture. Surgery remains a field associated with and dominated by men; an assumption the profession itself can perpetuate. Recent scandals concerning the lack of safety in British operating theaters for female surgeons, for example, revealed that surgical spaces can be seen as hypermasculine, violent, and threatening. Even in the twenty-first century, surgery and its environments, coupled with its gendered codes, have not yet made women welcome or comfortable; a situation with which female surgeons have been confronted historically whenever they have challenged the codes and spaces of surgery. The performance of surgery is seen both by the profession and by the public to require courage, single-mindedness, control, and confidence to act authoritatively and without wavering. With supreme power over patient lives, surgeon-figures can appear erroneously isolated from and superior to any team surrounding them. Such a god-like, scalpel-wielding complex has been perpetuated through fiction and visual media, such as film and television; surgeon characters remain arrogant, aggressive, and without scruples or thought outside self-aggrandizement. Research in the history of surgery has, however, increasingly explored, grappled with, dissected, and overturned the assumptions made about the surgeon, the surgical spaces, and the clinical encounters between patient and practitioner. Gender has been at the heart of these developments in rethinking surgery’s histories. Assertions that women were the passive recipients of a heartless and inconsiderate male-dominated profession have been interrogated through archival research into surgical practices. Although the critical and historical focus on gender is a product of more contemporary academic study, this is not to suggest that previous eras were not engaged with questioning surgical composition. In the 1870s, during hotly contested debates over women’s right to a medical education, the satirical periodical Punch drew attention to the many qualities required for surgical practice: the operator needing the heart of a lion, the eye of an eagle, and the hand of a lady. At the core of debates about what made a good surgeon, it was a mêlée of gendered characteristics, Punch agreed, that comprised the ideal individual.

General Overview

Since the early 1990s, research into the development of the surgical profession has been concerned with the corresponding history of the surgical stereotype and its related gender implications (see the range of material in Schlich 2018 for wider contextual factors). Led by Lawrence 1992, works have questioned the cultural, social, and professional reputation of the surgeon figure, not only its benefits, but also its challenges to the public trust in, inclusiveness of, and problems with the discipline. Gender has been intimately bound up with the surgical act and its heroics, as Chamberland 2009, Lawrence and Brown 2016, and Moscucci 1990 note. In particular, Jordanova 1989 and Dally 1991 conclude, ultimately, that to operate is to perform gendered violence upon the body. In the history of surgery, women, therefore, have formerly appeared “under” the knife, rather than wielding it. Morantz-Sanchez 1999, Morantz-Sanchez 2000 (both cited under Patients), Ghilchik 2011, and, more recently, Brock 2017 turn historical attention to those women who did take up surgery (or not as in Crowther and Dupree 2007), and the effects that the choice of profession had upon their own career as well as the reception of their actions in the worlds surrounding them. Arnold-Forster 2023 reflects upon the cultural perpetuation of surgical myths into the twenty-first century, and the gendered effects this has had upon perceptions—and self-perceptions—of the surgeon up to the present day and its legacy for the future.

• Arnold-Forster, Agnes. Cold, Hard Steel: The Myth of the Modern Surgeon. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2023.

  DOI: 10.7765/9781526156648

  A book-length analysis of modern surgical stereotypes that moves across genres as wide as television and film, popular fiction, and oral history, revealing the origins of surgical myths, and their impact on gender, race, and the personal and professional wellbeing of today’s surgeons.

• Brock, Claire. British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 1860–1918. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

  DOI: 10.1017/9781316911921

  The first full-length consideration of woman surgeons, the operations they performed, and the patients they treated through extensive use of archival sources at a key period in the development of modern surgery.

• Chamberland, Celeste. “Honor, Brotherhood, and the Corporate Ethos of London’s Barber-Surgeons’ Company, 1570–1640.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 64.3 (2009): 300–332.

  DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrp005

  Based on a wealth of primary sources, this article examines the ways in which early modern barber-surgeons sought to reinforce contemporary norms of masculinity to form a proto-professional identity and to enhance their legitimacy as practitioners.

• Crowther, M. Anne, and Marguerite W. Dupree. Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

  Taking a biographical approach, the authors follow the Edinburgh education and later career paths of students trained under the influence of the “surgical revolution” and Joseph Lister, including some of the pioneer generation of women medical students, such as Sophia Jex-Blake.

• Dally, Ann. Women under the Knife: A History of Surgery. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1991.

  Explores the varied responses of women doctors to surgical practices in the nineteenth century, concluding that although they challenged Victorian female stereotypes by entering the profession in the first place, surgery was viewed by many simply as unacceptable exploitation of and experimentation upon their own sex.

• Ghilchik, Margaret. The Fellowship of Women: Two Hundred Surgical Lives. St Ives, UK: Smith-Gordon, 2011.

  An excellent and lively resource, which explores, a century on from Eleanor Davies-Colley becoming the first female Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, the lives and careers of those who came after her.

• Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

  For Jordanova, bodily violations, such as dissection or surgery, are inherently violent acts, that have invaded particularly women’s sexual organs with brute force. Jordanova concludes that the performance of surgery is self-evidently a male act.

• Lawrence, Christopher, ed. Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

  A foundational and essential edited volume in the history of surgery, which contains an equally important chapter by Lawrence on the trajectory of the democratic, divine, and heroic reputation of the surgeon within the history and historiography of surgery from the nineteenth century onward.

• Lawrence, Christopher, and Michael Brown. “Quintessentially Modern Heroes: Surgeons, Explorers, and Empire, c. 1840–1914.” Journal of Social History 50.1 (2016): 148–178.

  DOI: 10.1093/jsh/shw014

  Productively links together the heroic activities and conquests during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of surgeons and explorers to compare the ways in which both colonized the new ground of bodies and territories.

• Moscucci, Ornella. The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  Explores the growth of this gendered specialty throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries, examining the establishment of institutions, debates surrounding female health and welfare, and the varied divisions among and between medical men and women over the performance of gynecological surgery.

• Schlich, Thomas, ed. The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

  The ongoing importance of gender to the field is indicated in this first major accompaniment to and overview of current research by leading scholars in the history of surgery. Relevant chapters include a consideration of the surgical trade between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, women as surgical patients and practitioners, nursing and surgery, abdominal surgery, surgery and anesthesia, art and surgery, surgical emotions, and neuro- and cosmetic surgery.