2023/12/31 by Agnes Arnold‐Forster · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Medical History and Innovations #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices #Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.7765/9781526156648.00014
This concluding chapter offers reflections on the surgical stereotype. Constructed around 200 years ago, the caricature of the emotionally detached, paternalistic, male, white, socially elite, and professionally committed practitioner was maintained, reinforced, and reconfigured throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the book has shown, surgeons have always felt things about their work, from grief and dismay at the death of a patient to frustration at hospital administration. But in the twenty-first century, the surgical profession has found its collective voice, and surgeons feel the need to express and explain themselves more than ever before. Ultimately, the surgical identity and the myth of the modern surgeon are both marked by contradictions, and it is these contradictions that have made the surgical stereotype so enduring.