Acknowledgements

The research for this project was immeasurably assisted by a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award (WT096499AIA), held between 2012 and 2014, which allowed me to concentrate exclusively upon it. I would like to thank the Trust for their ongoing faith in the value of the history of medicine, the medical humanities and work which doesn't fit into neat categories.

I would like especially to thank the following, who, hopefully, know why they're here: Julie Coleman; Gowan Dawson; Jennian Geddes; Elizabeth Hurren; Steve King; Bernie Lightman; Hilary Marland; and Peter Stanley. Audiences, over the past five years, at Bart's Pathology Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Universities of Portsmouth and Warwick have been particularly helpful to me. At Cambridge University Press, Lucy Rhymer has been a fantastic editor. The two anonymous reviewers were the best an author could wish for in many ways: thank you very much.

Some parts of chapter 1 have appeared as ‘Risk, Responsibility and Surgery in the 1890s and Early 1900s’, Medical History, 57.3 (July 2013), 317–37, reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press and ‘Surgical Controversy at the New Hospital for Women, 1872–1892’, Social History of Medicine, 24.3 (December 2011), 608–23, reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

I have been to archives across the length and breadth of the country for this project and would like to thank all those who have assisted me. Victoria Rea has to come first, because I spent most of my time, in freezing cold and boiling hot weather, at Belsize Park, when the Royal Free Hospital Archives were located there. As anyone who ever went there will know, there was something special about this place and I'm sorry it's no longer there. Thank you also to the staff at Birmingham City Archives, Brotherton Library, Leeds, Edinburgh University Library, Ipswich Record Office, London Metropolitan Archives, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and the Women's Library, London.

To my family, in old and New South Wales, there are very few words to express my gratitude. My parents, Siân and Paul Brock, my sister, Helen Giddings, and my grandparents, Vera and Francis Connolly, have been with me every step of the way. My other grandparents, the late Ann and Fred Brock, are no longer here to be thanked in person, but cannot be left out. Ben Dew has learned far more about women's health in this period than anyone should ever have to know. He has, however, never grumbled when I have enthused at length about surgery nor groaned (too much) when I have told him horrifying tales from the archives. I don't know what I would do without him, nor without his love and understanding. This book (gory bits and all) is for him.