Learning to Cut: Surgical Training and Practice, 1450-1800

Across early modern Europe, surgeons played a key role in the provision of everyday healthcare. They dressed wounds, lanced boils, set bones, treated tumours, as well as performing specialist operations such as couching cataracts or cutting for the stone. They carried out anatomies and autopsies, prepared corpses for embalming, and, if they were entitled to do so, occasionally performed major operations such as removing cancers, amputating limbs, and trepanning skulls. Yet, while recent studies have done much to elucidate the work of surgeons, little has been published about how they were trained.

Learning to Cut fills this significant gap. A range of case studies from the French, Italian, German, and English contexts reveal diverse modes of surgical teaching and learning in early modern towns and cities, and how they were shaped by existing social, economic, and occupational structures. Equally varied were the spaces and institutions where prospective practitioners learned and experienced surgery. Thus, the shop, the patient's house, the hospital, the guild hall, and the anatomy theatre were all sites for learning, teaching - and cutting. The chapters present rich narratives of education and, together, shed new light on the practice of early modern surgery.