In this episode, second-year medical student Spencer Mehdizadeh chose to speak to the historian of medicine Michael Brown, PhD about his 2022 book Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912. We discuss anesthesia, pain, emotions, surgery, history, and the experiences of both patients and surgeons in the nineteenth century and today.

Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (2014)

Rob Boddice, Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion, and Experience (2023) 

Martin Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (1985)

Stephanie J. Snow, Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaesthetics Changed the World (2008)

James Kennaway, “Celts Under the Knife: Surgical Fortitude, Racial Theory and the British Army” (2020)

Rob Boddice, Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (2021)

M. Anne Crowther and Marguerite W. Dupree, Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution (2007)