Women under the knife:a history of surgery

Because caesarian operations began the major development of internal surgery in the 19th century, it was women who bore the brunt of surgical experimentation and who also reaped its rewards. Dally chronicles the development of internal surgery from the earliest operations in America, Edinburgh, Paris and London. She tells the story through the lives of the leading surgeons and patients of the day, through contemporary authors such as Fanny Burney (who wrote a harrowing description of her mastectomy), and builds up a picture of Victorian society and the position of women within it, the difficulties faced by women doctors, sinister developments such as cliterodectomies and the use of black women slaves as guinea pigs.