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.*

2025-2026 Lecture Series

We are delighted to announce our 42nd speaker series. NEW THIS YEAR: all lectures take place at 7pm Eastern Time. This will make it easier for folks who are joining after work or from more western time zones. The lectures are still free and open to the public via Zoom. Watch this space, join our email list, or check out our Facebook page to get the link.

September 30, 2025 ~ Milton Meyer Michaels Lecture

 "The History of Hemophilia"

Franklin Bontempo, MD (Medicine/Hematology, University of Pittsburgh)

November 11, 2025 ~ Sylvan E. Stool Memorial Lecture

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

Alisha Rankin, PhD (History, Tufts)

January 20, 2026 ~ Graduate School of Public Health speaker + Annual Business Meeting ~ 

"Beyond the Broad Street Pump: Insights into the History of Public Health"

Jamie Sokol (Public Health, University of Pittsburgh)

February 24, 2026

"White-Capped Dreams: The (Dis)appearance of Filipino Men Nurses Under the Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945"

Ren Capucao, MSN, RN, and PhD 

(Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry, School of Nursing, University of Virginia)

April 7, 2026 ~ Jonathon Erlen Lecture

"The Antonine Plague and the End of Ancient Rome's Golden Era"

Colin Elliott, PhD (History, University of Indiana, Bloomington)

The Legacy of Infant Surgery without Anesthesia: Implications for Today

Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 6-7:15pm (Eastern)

~ Jonathon Erlen Lecture ~

Wendy Patrice Williams (Independent Scholar)

In the United States until 1986, it was standard medical protocol for surgeons to operate on infants and children under two without anesthesia or pain control; instead, paralytic drugs were given to keep them still, though conscious, albeit in an altered state. In 1952 at 26 days old, Wendy Patrice Williams underwent surgery for pyloric stenosis, and her memoir Autobiography of a Sea Creature: Healing the Trauma of Infant Surgery recounts the lifelong struggles she has endured with the preverbal trauma which resulted and also details the ways in which she has found to heal. Over many years as a blogger and as a result of the publication of her book, she has encountered numerous other individuals who have had similar histories and struggles, and in fact, anyone currently age 39 and older may be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from infant surgery without anesthesia or pain control, a practice largely unacknowledged in medicine and only beginning to be understood by mental health professionals as a source of preverbal trauma.

In her memoir, Autobiography of a Sea Creature: Healing the Trauma of Infant Surgery (University of California Health Humanities Press, 2023), Wendy Patrice Williams shares her story of healing from PTSD that resulted from a stomach surgery at one-month old. She reveals her discovery that pre-1987, it was standard practice that infants needing surgery were not given anesthesia or pain control. Wendy blogs at Healing Infant Trauma and appears in the film Cutdown: Infant Surgery without Anesthesia, produced by Roey Shmool and free to watch at the link. Wendy earned a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College and taught English at the College of Alameda and Folsom Lake College. She also studied biological sciences at Barnard College and marine science at the University of Miami. More information is available on her author page.

Here is a recording of the lecture.

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.

Defining and Treating Heart Disease: A History

Dr. Arnold Meshkov, a Philadelphia-area cardiologist who has published a book on the history of the science and technology around myocardial infarction (heart attack) was the featured speaker in February.

His University of Pittsburgh Department of Medicine Grand Rounds talk is entitled "Catheterization of the Heart: From Self-Experimentation to Angioplasty." It will take place from 12-1pm on Tuesday, February 22, on Teams. Please reach out to the Department of Medicine if you would like to attend.

His C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society talk entitled "The Cholesterol Odyssey: Russian Rabbits to mRNA technology" took place from 6-7:15pm the same evening, Tuesday, February 22. You can watch the recorded lecture here.

To learn more about his book, Chasing the Widowmaker: The History of the Heart Attack Epidemic (2021), click the title.

Do you need disability accommodations to participate? Please email us at least 1 week in advance so that we can do our best to arrange for an ASL interpreter, screen captions, visual description, a transcript, etc.

Professor Jaipreet Virdi has had to postpone her lectures and book discussion on deafness cures in the history of medicine that were scheduled for February 2022. We look forward to welcoming her, perhaps in person, in February 2023. You can register to attend those events when the new times are announced closer to the date.

“He told me ... it would be just like being a virgin again”

"The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and Stock Assumptions"

Sarah Rodriguez, PhD

Global Health Studies, Northwestern University

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

6-7:15 pm Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Image credit: Jill Allyn Stafford, Reconstructing Georgia O'Keefe: Mourning (Flickr, 2008)

This lecture was not recorded.

Post title qtn from Montgomery Brower and Giovanna Breu, "James Burt's 'Love Surgery' Was Supported to Boost Pleasure, but Some Patients Say It Brought Pain," People (27 March 1989).

When a doctor almost got away with murder...

 

April 6, 2021, from 6-7:15pm

~ Annual Ravitch Lecture ~

"A Sordid Episode in the History of Medical Ethics:

The Gosnell Abortion-Murder Trial"

Andrew Herlich, DMD, MD

This is the lecture recording; there is no password.

You may want to make time to watch Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer (2018), the crowdfunded film starring Earl Billings and Michael Beach.

Image credit; Ri Butov, Pixabay.

The Daring Young Surgeons Who Pioneered Heart Surgery

Image credit: Heart Transplant Surgery, Wellcome Trust 

We were thrilled to open our 45th lecture season with "The Daring Young Surgeons Who Pioneered Heart Surgery" by David Cooper, MD (Co-Director, Xenotransplantation Program, Department of Surgery, University of Alabama at Birmingham). This was the April 2020 Ravitch Lecture, rescheduled and held via Zoom due to the pandemic.

Heart surgery was one of the greatest advances in medicine during the latter part of the 20th century. The surgeons who contributed to it include some of the most interesting personalities you could ever expect to meet.

It evolved from "closed" heart surgery, where the surgeon worked blindly only by touch, through "open" heart surgery with the brain protected by hypothermia, to patients supported by the heart-lung machine. It culminated in heart transplantation and the total replacement of the heart by a mechanical device. All of these advances took place within a period of about 50 years.

The presentation concentrated as much on the personal stories of the surgeons as on the contributions they made. You can watch it here.

Two notes: 1) The actual introductions and lecture content begin at 22:47. The lecture and Q&A afterward run just over 1 hour 30 minutes.

2) Dr. Cooper offered the 31st annual Mark M. Ravitch History of Medicine lecture, co-sponsored by the Department of Surgery of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Ravitch received his MD degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and took his surgical residency training at that institution. For twenty years he served as professor in the Department of Surgery of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and was Surgeon-in-Chief at Montefiore Hospital. Among his many contributions to the field of surgery were the advances he pioneered in the correction of chest wall deformities. Even with his hectic surgical work schedule Dr. Ravitch found time to be a major contributor to the scholarship in the history of surgery. His landmark 2 volume text, A Century of Surgery: The History of the American Surgical Association, remains the landmark work in this area of scholarship. Dr. Ravitch was also an international level bibliophile and rare book collector. He left the Health Sciences Library System of the University of Pittsburgh’s rare book collection a truly lasting legacy, as we serve as the custodians of his world class collection of 491 original titles on the history of hernia repair, from the mid-16th century through the first third of the 20th century. For all these reasons we were honored to celebrate his memory and to continue his pursuit of history of surgery knowledge and education.