The Skillful Surgeon: Expertise, Authority, and Surgical Illustrations in Late Renaissance Europe

Tuesday, November 11, 2025, 7-8:15pm

~ Sylvan E. Stool lecture ~

Alisha Rankin, PhD

Professor & Chair of History

Tufts University

Zoom link: https://pitt.zoom.us/j/91220360228 

Surgery was generally something to be feared in Renaissance Europe. Without anesthesia, antiseptics, or antibiotics, it was dangerous, painful, and often deadly. Yet surgeons were also among the most populous and valued medical practitioners at the time, and they took their jobs seriously. This talk examines surgeons’ efforts to highlight their skill and competency. It focuses on illustrated writings by surgeons who conducted elective surgeries: couching for cataracts, removing bladder stones by lithotomy, and operating on inguinal hernias. In the German-speaking regions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several specialist surgeons compiled ornately illustrated documentation of their expertise. In a bid to raise the status of specialists, I argue, these upwardly-mobile surgeons used both text and images to celebrate their significant skill and portray these elective surgical operations as reliable and routine.

Alisha Rankin is Professor and Chair of History at Tufts University and a co-editor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Her work focuses on the history of medicine and science in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on questions of experiment, expertise and authority. She is the author of two award-winning books, Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2013) and The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (Chicago, 2021), alongside two edited collections and multiple articles. Currently she is co-editing the Cambridge History of Medicine, Volume 3: Early Modern Medicine, 1450-1700 and working on a book about specialist surgeons, from which this talk derives.

Attendance at this Zoom lecture is free.

*Please note the new time! After decades of events at 6pm on Tuesday evenings, we are pushing back the start time to 7pm to better accommodate folks who are commuting, have sign-out after a shift, or are joining us from more western time zones. We are also no longer catering dinner since the pandemic. Therefore, all lectures will begin at 7pm Eastern and wrap up by 8:15pm.*