Lynda S. Payne
I am currently researching and writing a monograph on the eighteenth-century surgeon Percivall Pott. The working title is “The best surgeon in England”: The Life of Percivall Pott, 1714-88. Sir D’Arcy Powers, an early twentieth-century historian of medicine, called Percivall Pott, the “Prince of Eponyms.” A medical student today would know of Pott’s puffy tumor (a brain abscess), Pott’s disease of the spine (tuberculosis), and Pott’s dislocated fracture of the ankle (a complicated break). They might know that the archaic name for cancer of the scrotum was Pott’s disease and that Percivall Pott was the first medical man to argue that an external agent could cause cancer. (Soot trapped in the skin folds of young chimney sweeps caused cancer in adulthood). Pott’s contemporaries, however, would know that he was the best practical surgeon in eighteenth-century England and a prolific author. No scholarly biography of Pott exists, and indeed, few biographies of surgeons have ever been produced by historians of medicine. This is also true of works on the clinical and social history of surgery. Instead the focus has been on the lives of physicians and medicine in general. Where surgery and surgeons are addressed, it has been largely in terms of technology (the development of instruments, anesthesia, asepsis), and innovation (new techniques in operating). Yet, without an examination of what surgeons did, why, and how, the historical experience of illness and healing is impossible to grasp. Examining the careers of surgeons like Percivall Pott, who confronted pain and death in an era before the development of anesthesia, can tell us a great deal about what we all share with humans past and present – the experience of suffering.
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email: paynel@umkc.edu
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