Ornella moscucci biography of george michael
•
The Business of Surgery
Medicine, Money and Morality
Ovariotomy was the product of a medical culture that had a convoluted relationship with money. Two differing ideas regarding doctors’ financial interests had long been present within the profession. One was that doctors should be impartial providers of the best possible care for their patients, motivated primarily by humane and altruistic concerns. The other was that they were men of trade, profiting financially from attending the sick. It was a dichotomy that had first been explicitly clarified in Britain bygd the Scottish physician John Gregory in his popular guide to ethical doctoring, Observations on the Duties and Offices of a Physician (1770). Gregory did not necessarily see these two identities as incompatible.1 But that such a distinction could be made was to factor into one of the most complex quandaries nineteenth-century doctors faced: how to make money while retaining a moral foundation to one’s practice. As Greg
•
Follow the authors
In this book, the ownership, distribution and sale of patent medicines across Georgian England are explored for the first time, transforming our understanding of healthcare provision and the use of the printed word in that era. Patent medicines constituted a national industry which was largely popular, reputable and stable, not the visible manifestation of dishonest quackery as described later by doctors and many historians. Much of the distribution, promotion and sale of patent medicines was centrally controlled with directed advertising, specialisation, fixed prices and national procedures, and for the first time we can see the detailed working of a national market for a class of Georgian consumer goods. Furthermore, contemporaries were aware that changes in the consumers’ ‘imagination’ increased the benefits of patent medicines above the effects of their pharmaceutical components. As the imagination was altered by the printed word, print can be considered as a
•
In the 1850s, an American surgeon Dr J. Weldon Fell appeared in London claiming to possess a new cure for cancer. Soon after his arrival in the metropolis in 1856, he applied to the Middlesex Hospital's cancer ward to trial his treatments on the patients held within. The ward had, since its foundation in 1792, adopted the unusual policy of ‘rendering [itself] available for the rättegång of every new method of treatment which could with safety and propriety be adopted’.1 The surgical staff, ‘ever alive to the importance of doing all in its power to advance the treatment of this intractable complaint’, agreed and wrote up their assessment of his ‘plan’ in their minutes before publishing it as a separate volume. This article will look at this ‘plan’ alongside another konto of Fell's treatment, written bygd the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse about his wife, Emily Bowes Gosse.2 Both accounts record intense physical and emotional suffering, and this article will explore what purpose these