Surgery

“Thus, the practice of operating appears to be a versatile craft. It resembles building or carpentry in the way bones are sawed, drilled, chiseled and screwed together; tailoring, where skin and tissue of different consistency are cut apart and sewn together; the work of sailors, when various knots are tied; and a butcher’s trade, when muscles and innards are carved up” (Hirschauer, 300). . . surgery and experimental physiology are both technologies of control and that the specific spaces they used were shaped by this fact, . . . in many ways, experimental physiology is surgical in character and origin. Like surgeons physiologists tried to reach control by active surgical intervention into living bodies. The practice of performing animal experiments actually came from surgery (Schlich II, 238) . . . . Surgery and experimental physiology have in common that they both require a controlled violation of the integrity of the body (239). . . . Just as in human surgery, antisepsis and asepsis opened up a range of activities to physiologists (238-39). . . . [In addition to control] the two fields converged also because surgeons during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries increasingly adopted ideals from laboratory science, which, as we will see, was eventually reflected in the set-up and the design of operating room. . . . The laboratory revolution coincided chronologically with the rise of surgery. By the end of the nineteenth century, surgery and laboratory science were both generally regarded as the epitome of progress in scientific medicine. Surgeons saw their new operations, such as tonsillectomy, appendectomy and, in particular thyroidectomy . . . as based on science.” (240) . . . In the late nineteenth century, a new generation of surgeons began to reconstruct the functions of internal organs. They were functionally oriented and looked to experimental physiology for the scientific basis of their practice. The paradigmatic technology of this switch in perspective was organ transplantation, which emerged form this confluence of surgery and laboratory science between 1880 and 1920. . . . Transplant surgery began with the Swiss surgeon Theodor Kocher in the early 1880sa. . . . Tellingly, Kocher’s surgical removal of the thyroid gland in humans came to be understood as an inadvertently performed physiological experiment, a ‘vivisection humaine.’ Subsequently, physiologists as well as surgeons in almost all European countries started to perform animal experiments on thyroid removal” (241). . . . asepsis can be seen as the extension of the control achieved in the bacteriology laboratory to the operating room. With the spread of aseptic surgery, the designers of operating rooms subjected surgical spaces to the same precautions that governed a laboratory for bacterial research. In both places, these precautions served to literally control microscopic life forms and keep them out of vulnerable places. In the case of the laboratory, such a vulnerable place was the pure culture of bacteria. In the operating room, it was the surgical would” (244). Cf. Adams & Schlich, 313: “The paradigmatic technology of this switch in perspective was organ transplantation, which emerged form this confluence of surgery and laboratory science between 1880 and 1920. With transplant surgery, surgeons turned away from a purely local and structural approach, took up experimental research methods, and started to look at the body from a systemic and function point of view. Experimental physiology replaced pathological anatomy as a reference science.”