Ludmilla Jordanova: Cultures of Surgery

All medical fields have their cultures, both among professionals and in the wider world. Such cultures tend to be metaphorically rich. By that token surgery has been associated with, variously, butchery, cutting open, delving inside, mutilation, penetration and so on. We can see these features in satires, which for several centuries have developed a critical language, visual as well as verbal, for speaking about the aspects of surgery that perhaps seem most frightening to outsiders, and that may sometimes be embraced by insiders in developing a collective identity. Feminist commentators and artists have been particularly alert to the gender issues embedded in medical cultures generally, and surgical cultures specifically. I was first working on these themes in the 1980s, but since then a good deal has changed. One of the most striking shifts is the rise of elective surgery, which covers a wide range of phenomena, but in all cases is capable of shedding light on the ways people th