Welcome, readers, to the blog for Surgery & Emotion, a Wellcome-Trust funded project about the emotional landscape of surgery from 1800 to the present day.
You can find out more about the project itself on the Homepage of this website but I just wanted to take this opportunity to introduce the blog and tell you what you can expect from it.
Our research and activities as academics often throw up really interesting and exciting material that we want to share with the wider public. So this blog will provide a space for the members of the project team to talk about their work and to provide a snapshot of their research. We will be sharing our reflections not only on surgery in the nineteenth century but also on the place of emotions in surgery today. We believe this is a really interesting, exciting and relevant topic. The last few years have seen the publication of surgical memoirs, such as Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm (2014) which talk about the emotions involved in surgery, while the Royal College of Surgeons of England’s most recent guide to Good Surgical Practice (2014) acknowledges the role that emotions, including ‘joy and disappointment’, play in surgical careers.
At Surgery & Emotion, we believe that debates about the place of emotion in surgery are vital and can improve life for surgeon and patients alike. We also think that such debates are enriched and informed through an understanding of history and an awareness of the lessons that the past can teach us.
We hope you will enjoy the blog and that, in reading about surgery and emotion, it will provoke a range of emotions in you too. Some of the material we will be dealing with might be difficult and challenging, but we hope you think it worth it in learning more about surgical worlds, past and present. If you enjoy the blog, please follow us on Twitter @SurgicalEmotion and if you would like to know more, please head over to the ‘Publications’ section of the website where you can read our research in more detail – they are all open access.
Thanks for reading and we hope you check in again!
Image: Robert Liston operating. Henry Board (c. 1912). (Wellcome Images)
