Visualising venereal disease in London c.1780-1860

This thesis explores the various roles that visual representations played in the theoretical understanding of, and practical approaches to, venereal disease in London’s medical marketplace from around 1780 to 1860. Venereal disease was understood in a variety of ways, and conceptualised within a number of different medical disciplines, such as pathology and dermatology. The analytic lens of visual representation allows the historian to explore the complexities of these understandings. This thesis therefore contributes to the literature on the historicising of disease. The period under discussion was one of enormous change in medical theory, practice and disciplinary organisation. Disease was being conceptualised as something physical within the body, meaning images of the disease took on new meanings. Furthermore, these representations played an important role in medical education of the period, as well as in the legitimisation of new disciplines. Within these new theoretical paradigms and institutional spaces, various new meanings were created for the visual representations, and their creators and users had to employ various strategies to limit their meaning and control their interpretations. This thesis utilises a variety of visual and material representations – atlas illustrations, wax moulages, paintings, casts, models and pathological preparations – to see how meaning was negotiated for these visual representations. Venereal disease is a particularly complex case, as it was considered difficult to depict, therefore debates and disagreements over how it was to be visualised reveal much about how the disease was conceptualised. Through five chapters, the thesis explores how these representations functioned within different spaces in London’s medical marketplace, such as public museums, private schools, hospitals and university medical departments

Blind alleys and dead ends: researching innovation in late twentieth-century surgery

This article examines the fortunes of one particular surgical innovation in the treatment of gallstones in the late 20th century; the percutaneous cholecystolithotomy (PCCL). This was an experimental procedure which was trialled and developed in the early days of minimally invasive surgery and one which fairly rapidly fell out of favour. Using diverse research methods from textual analysis to oral history to re-enactment, the authors explore the rise and fall of the PCCL demonstrating that such apparent failures are as crucial a part of innovation histories as the triumphs and have much light to shed on the development of surgery more generally.</jats:p