4. The Surgical Patient

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we take a look at the patient experience in the 19th century. Surgery continued to be very dangerous despite all the innovations of the 19th century. However, the later 19th century saw an increase in the range of surgery available to patients, most notably leading to the rise of what is now known as elective surgery.

Course

In this course, Dr Sally Frampton (University of Oxford) explores how surgery developed in the 19th-century. In the first three modules, we look at how surgeons in the 19th-century sought to tackle the three issues of pain, bleeding, and infection. In the fourth module, we focus in on the patient experience throughout the 19th century. In the final module, we look at surgeons themselves and how the process of becoming a surgeon changed over the course of the century.

Lecturer

Dr Sally Frampton is a research fellow at the University of Oxford. She has written widely on the history of surgery, including works on surgical risk and innovation. Her current research explores the global development of medical journalism as a specialist form of writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how it has shaped the meaning of medicine.