"The main problem of leech therapy related to excessive bleeding following the removal of leeches... Another problematical situation was the inadvertent escape of leeches into the throat or stomach." The period 1800 to 1825 saw the beginnings of scientific exploration and debate, most of the basis for later developments. This learned overview provides fascinating information about beliefs in galvanism and bioelectric machinery, blood-letting, cesareans without anesthesia, the influence of weather and the moon, drugs, vaccination, more. Heavily illustrated.

This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, while also remaining at the boundaries of ethical acceptability. This book traces the operation’s innovation, from its roots in eighteenth-century pathology, through the denouncement of those who performed it as ‘belly-rippers’, to its rapid uptake in the 1880s, when ovariotomists were accused of over-operating. Throughout the century, the operation was never a hair’s breadth from controversy.