>> Sara Duke:
I'd like to welcome all of you.
It is wonderful to see this
turnout.
My name is Sara Duke, and I am
the curator of popular and
applied graphic art in the
Princeton Photographs Division
of the Library of Congress.
Today's program is sponsored by
the Prints and Photographs
Division, which has hosted the
Swann Fellowship Program for
over 25 years.
It is my pleasure to introduce
Zoe Copeman as speaker today,
but before I do, permit me to
say a few words about the Swann
Fellowship Program.
It is one of the few programs
in the United States dedicated
to funding graduate and
postgraduate research in
caricature and cartoon.
There is no limitation
regarding the place or time
period covered.
The Swann board encourages
research in a variety of
academic disciplines, so long
as the fellows focus on the art
form. Swann fellows must spend
at least two weeks at the
Library of Congress consulting
caricature and cartoon
collections and donate to the
Library of Congress
one copy of publication-- any
publication that arises from
their research.
The Swann board, when offering
fellowships, selectively awards-- 
invites awardees to speak
at the library and present their
work in progress.
We are very fortunate to have
Zoe Copeman with us today.
Miss Copeman is a Ph.D. candidate
in art history and archaeology
at the University of Maryland,
College Park.
She earned her B.A. from the
University of Maryland and her
M.A. from the University College,
London.
Her presentation today, "Were
They so Tortuous?
Reevaluating Modern Surgeries
Underdog Story"
is related to her
forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation,
"Cankerous Femme: The European
Mastectomy and the Semiotics of
Surgery," in which she uses
caricatures as well as oil
paintings and medical texts to
examine changes in public
perception towards surgery in
the 18th and 19th centuries.
Zoe Copeman has been exploring
caricature and cartoon not only
in the Prints and Photographs
Division, but in the Rare Book
and Special Collections
Division.
It has been my pleasure to make
collections available for her to
research. Please welcome her
today as she provides her
insights into the images she
has used.
[Applause]
>> Zoe Copeman:
Thank you so much, Sara.
That was just a great
introduction.
And before I begin, I do also
want to just thank the Swann
Foundation for this opportunity
to just get the dedicated time
to look at these prints in
person.
It was just really eye-opening
for me.
And also, again, to Sara for
the amount of works that she
pulled for me, despite being in
a back brace and everyone at 
the P&P just been so lovely.
You in the research world
are just the heroes.
So before I actually get to the
caricatures, there's a bit of
backstory I actually have to
address for this to kind of make
sense, going back to the
subject of my dissertation.
So the subject of my talk
today, representations of
surgeons and their tools, comes
out as Sara previewed my
dissertation entitled "Cankerous
Femme:
The European Mastectomy and
the Semiotics of Surgery,"
in which I investigate the visual
language through which surgeons
taught their trade from the 17th
through the 19th century, a
time period that really
corresponds with the rise of--
academies specifically devoted
to the practice of surgery.
So here's just a little
timeline of a few of those
academies that you see here,
notably Paris and London.
And much of this history is
told from the perspective of
surgeons and how their field
transformed over the course of
the 19th century into the
medical discipline as we
understand it today.
This is the underdog story that
I have referenced in the title
for my talk. But in case you're
not familiar with it, the
standard narrative goes:
surgeons also known as
barbers were once placed in
this hierarchy between
physicians and apprentices.
Apprentice-trained 
apothecaries, rather.
And surgeons with their own
training, largely through
apprenticeships,
they were thought to lack the
educations of physicians.
You see physicians, they had a
university-trained education,
and generally physicians were
the ones that you would go to to
diagnose your disease and to
get prescriptions.
Surgeons were then brought in
for procedures.
That is to say, the physicians
acted as the eyes and the brain
and the surgeons as their
hands.
And this relationship is shown
in this woodcut I have on screen
here, where a physician
dictates as a barber anatomizes
the corpse. And yes, barbers or
barber surgeons were the ones
cutting up criminal corpses
after execution, often in
displays not just for medical
people, but for the public writ
large. By the end of the 17th
century, surgeons would try to--
divorce the themselves
from barbers by establishing
their own separate field. And
pretty successfully too, I might
add, as today, when you go to
the operating room, you don't
expect to see a surgeon.
Well, you don't expect to see a
barber there, right?
You expect to see a surgeon.
But this separation was not so
simple to achieve. In England,
it was only granted in 1745.
And this is a different
timeline, as you can see from
the founding of separate
surgical academies.
But this is because the
separation was less about
formalizing education and more
about limiting the practices of
barbers. With these acts,
barbers could no longer practice
surgery legally.
Naturally, however, these dates
seem a bit cut and dry, and
that's because they are.
It's far easier to say that no
barber in London ever practiced
surgery again, but that would
be a false statement.
Much has been written on the
reality of the 18th century
medical market, where medical
pluralism actually thrived.
There were not only barber
surgeons, but surgeon
apothecaries, as well as
surgeons who were a part of the
Royal College of Physicians.
And the hierarchy that I
mentioned earlier of physician,
surgeon, apothecary was not
also reality in terms of
practice, nor in terms of
public perception.
The majority of the public had
little regard for the physician
that seemed to stick up their
nose at them.
So I'm showing you here
a mid-18th century book written
for parents actually informing
them on how they could set up
their children in a London trade
for success.
And this is one of the ways to
show you how they disagreed with
surgeons, and how the
physicians were not actually on
the top of the tier, because in
Campbell's-- compendium here, he
also reveals how the physician
to enter the-- trade, he gives no
advice. The only advice he
gives is to be a gentleman.
In Campbell's compendium, he
also reveals to parents how much
it would cost to enter and set
up shop as a master in each
trade. And here you can see
that our three divisions of
medicine have some of the least
amount of data, which could be
because it varied too much,
Campbell lacked the data, or is
already referred to. With
physicians the requirements to
enter and establish oneself was
just as much determined on
social standing as it was money.
In terms of our underdog story,
surgeons were indeed more of a
mixed bag of backgrounds than
physicians, but when it came to
public opinion, surgeons were
not seen as any lesser than
their physician apothecary, or,
as we will see, quack
counterparts.
The underdog story of surgeons
being thought of by the public
as lower than physicians has
already been dismantled by such
historians as Roy Porter and
Arthur Lewis Wyman, yet this
narrative still pervades in
popular media retellings, even
more disconcertingly in actual
surgical literature.
It's here that the underdog
story is reified to paint a
picture of surgical heroism,
and what interested me the most
in that narrative was not the
surgeon as hero, but the surgeon
as once tortuous, uneducated
quack.
And I came across this
narrative time and again in
surgical articles, particularly
devoted to the history of
mastectomies, and how trying an
experience that was for patients
until the widespread use of
asepsis and anesthesia that
would allow, as you see here,
William Halsted, to pioneer his
radical mastectomy.
This reveals why my dissertation
uses the mastectomy as a case
study, because it is a huge
part of surgical literature,
particularly in the 20th
century.
And it-- part of that literature
is this investment in this
underdog narrative, to the
extent that surgeons even became
themselves anthropologists
attempting to show how early
modern surgical tools were also
used for capital punishment by
linking their surgical tools to
martyrdoms.
On this page are a number of
articles that use
representations of Saint Agatha
to make visible what women until
anesthesia would have gone
through when undergoing a
mastectomy. And there's a lot
to unpack there, which is why I
have a whole dissertation on
it, from the fact that you have
a saint standing in for patient
subjectivity to, of course, the
conflation of patients with
criminals.
But for the purpose of this
talk, how surgeons and their
tools are represented became a
question of mine particularly
since the tools that these twentieth-
century surgeons highlight as
representative of their
torturous past were actually not
used during medical
mastectomies at all.
My question became
why such the emphasis then?
And needless to say, I became a
little bit obsessed.
So this led me to then conduct
a survey to determine not only
how and when these tools would
have been used, but how people
actually thought of them during
their respective time periods.
Were they perceived as torturous
by the individuals undergoing
these surgeries?
And the short answer is, as you
could probably expect, it
depended on the patient.
What I also found was that the
devices twentieth-century surgeons
falsely attributed to the
radical mastectomy were used
instead in many different
surgical operations during the
17th and 18th centuries for
bone cutting, teeth, corns, and
tumor removal, and even had
affiliations with forceps later
invented for obstetrics.
Particularly because in Latin
forceps was a catchall terms
for all these tools listed on
the right in this table here,
used as such in English and
French in the 18th century.
This is just to show you this
mapping process that I did
throughout all these different
types of visual media, tracing
how these tools were
represented in all of them.
More importantly, all these
tools would have been used, I
found, by a variety of other
tradesmen of the time, like
clothmakers, joiners,
chemists, fullers and farriers.
And so you can see how this
type of tool is actually
associated with many different
disciplines.
And yet these trades, as seen
earlier with Campbell's
compendium, had different
monetary requirements to enter
them and thus different social
reputations attached.
And in conducting this survey,
I found that the forceps,
particularly when paired with
the surgeon, took on a symbolic
nature beyond a tool of surgery
or even torture,
but another aspect of surgeries'
underdog story, social mobility.
And so, for the remainder of
this talk, I'm going to take us
through types of satirical
representations that utilize the
surgeon and his tools as a
symbolic device, these being
either to critique the field
writ large, critique individual
practitioners, or, my favorite
critique a political person or
state not related to the
surgical field at all.
Yet that casts various members
as surgeons to reveal some truth
about their barbarous nature.
While we see these first two
categories throughout the 18th
century, this last grouping
would only emerge near the end
of the century, becoming a
favored symbolic device of
British caricaturists in the
early 19th century.
How and why these categories
come about is the true subject
of my talk today.
So with that, we can finally
begin with our caricature.
Critiquing the surgical field.
In this print, fittingly titled
"The Battle of the 
Barbers and Surgeons,"
we see a frenzy of
activity as these two
professions duel it out, even
as 21st-century viewers who
might not be aware of the
discrepancies between surgeons
and barbers, we can readily
distinguish the two through
dress. So the surgeons, you can
see are wearing overcoats, their
waistcoats, breeches and
tights, and, of course, their
starched wigs. This is a very
traditional kind of even old-
fashioned dress for the period,
while the barbers have much
more updated dress with their
shorter coats and, of course,
their aprons.
We also have distinctions made
with the tools of their
respective trades in their
pockets.
So the surgeons have their
various saws, syringes, forceps,
and, of course, their gold-headed
canes, which was the mark of a
licensed doctor at the time.
And the barbers have combs,
razors, scissors, and pans.
But the more you look at the
scene, the more those
differences begin to dissolve.
First and foremost, there is no
difference between the barbarity
of these figures.
The central two are equally
matched, while the flanking
pairs show opposite outcomes.
As this barber wails into this
surgeon's face, the cane of
another surgeon is about to
break the nose of another
barber, and the actual tools,
the forceps and the pan meant to
represent each profession
respectively, become useless
symbols left to scatter the
ground, and the wig being ripped
apart by the dog could just as
well represent the surgeon or
the barber. As we see
also, this one barber
besides-- beside the man about to whack
him in the nose, he has a very
similar dress.
In fact, when we expand our
view to the back of the brawl,
there becomes really no
difference in dress or
attributes between these men and
 notably, a woman in the back
and on the horizon through the
window, a trope that is often
used in art to show the true
side of things.
A barber's pole hangs with a
pan from it, and that striped
pole actually alludes to a
bloody bandage, one that you
would have after leaving a
barber surgeon's shop, after
having your hair cut and your
blood let.
The pole is a reference to the
once unification of these two
fields that began in 1540 and
lasted over two centuries.
So we could just as much be
looking at a scene from 1745,
when the surgeons petitioned
Parliament to establish their
own company and restrict the
practices of-- barbers. Humorously
actually referred to in this
print by the central barber, as
he proclaims that he still lets
blood for a penny, while the
surgeon charges a pound for the
same procedure, and yet this is
not 1745 but 1797, August
1797, to be precise.
And another print from that
month gives us a bit more clues
to the situation at hand.
In 1797, surgeons petitioned
Parliament to have a separate
Royal College of Surgeons like
the Royal College of Physicians.
The surgeons-- they no longer 
wanted to be a livery company.
However, that bill that would
have them have their own college
was shot down in 1797 by the
man also pictured in that print,
who maintained that surgery
was, "A mere trading
company who should be compelled
to use a gallipot 
and a red rag."
Thurlow's speech was recounted
in many journals, and this whole
kerfuffle, widely portrayed in
caricature, as we see here in
these two prints, and we
already know that the surgeons
would establish their college
just a few years later.
But during this period, the
decades before it, there was
confusion about where surgeons
actually stood, not just with
other medical practitioners,
but in society writ large, a
confusion that is also evident
in these two prints.
In terms of caricature, they
have very similar styles, each
using distortion to poke fun at
the surgeon who seems to think
himself above the barber.
But I'll point out a
discrepancy. Where the left image
uses tools to associate the
surgeon with barbarity,
those tools are
discreetly missing from their
surgical peers on the right.
Mary Dorothy George, in her
assessment of this print on the
right, says that these men
represent the well-educated and
dignified minority of surgeons
anxious for a college, whereas
the majority during this period
could have cared less.
She says that most surgeons
belong to a class of small
shopkeepers who are satisfied
with their city company, as it
was allowing them to practice
without the need for the type of
medical education we have
today.
Now, this sort of language
associating well-educated with
dignified, I find particularly
interesting given that
the left caricature shows these
same characters slip back into a
barbarous mode with ease.
Nevertheless, I want to argue
here that it is this very
dichotomy between well-educated
and less dignified, which makes
the surgical field and the
surgeon a particularly potent
symbolic device.
As an individual, that could be
just as much a part of high
society, writing bills and
petitioning to Parliament and
low society, brawling in the
streets.
The surgeon and the surgical
field represented the
malleability and uncertainty of
the times, particularly when it
came to social mobility.
The overall confusion over
proper roles in eighteenth-century
society is evident in the
British Cartoon Prints
Collection here at the Library
of Congress.
On the screen alone, you see a
mix of characters, from barbers,
surgeons and doctors to
dentists, undertakers, midwives,
dissectors, and, yes, grave
robbers.
The well-educated and elite,
alongside the ill educated and
impoverished. These are vastly
different characters, and yet
they are all united by a single
tool, the forceps.
But I'll argue alongside
forceps,
another characteristic defines
all of them: the arrogance of
thinking that they are above
their true station.
We see this most prominently in
this early example called "The
Barber Shop," an engraving from
1730, when barbers and surgeons
were still one company, in which
we see the master barber in the
form of an ape holding a
forceps up to a cat-child to
pluck the whiskers from his
head, while his apprentices
bloodlet a cat-woman in the
back.
And as if casting of these
various persons in the guise of
animals wasn't enough, the
barber literally being an ape,
the text accompanying the print
makes clear its intention.
A Barber's shop, a medley shews,
of Monsters, Wigs, drawn teeth
and news. While one is Shav'd
and other bleeds, a third the
grub-street journal reads. The
master full of Whig and Tory,
talks politics and 
tells the Story,
and swears he's not such a Sot,
but that he knows full well
what's what.
This caption entirely rewrites
how we're supposed to read this
print, in that while it
displays the barber surgeon as a
quack, denoted by the various
creatures hanging from the
ceiling and esoteric language
written on the wall, and
certainly is unmasking the
profession as uncouth,
because, as I'm sure you also
notice, the elephant-man in the
background is holding down the
woman by groping her breast,
what the print is really
commenting on is social
mobility. The reference to
Whigs and Tories is of interest
during this period in the
1730s, when what each of these
parties stood for was
constantly changing,
particularly around what they
thought of dynastic power and
social order. But that doesn't
really matter to the barber.
All he wants to do is tell a
story, revealing another
important aspect of this
particular time in the 18th
century, that the barber
surgeon shop was actually a
place of political
conversation. This was a place
where the barber, he had
subscriptions to journals where
you can go and talk about the
news while you waited for your
appointment, kind of like the
magazines we have at our doctor
appointments today.
But this effectively turned the
barbershop into a gathering
place where people increasingly
of different backgrounds could
mingle, like the coffeeshops
of the 18th century.
A similar satirizing of working
class tradesmen overstepping
their bounds is seen in this
1760s print,
"The Politicians," where we see
various tradesmen who, while
hawking their bills of trade,
also lend out freely their
political opinions.
These two prints comment on
something much larger than
criticizing individual trades.
They exhibit an increasing
anxiety over the dissolution of
clear hierarchies within
society,
and not just from a
class standpoint either.
When surgeons began to encroach
upon the practice of midwifery,
which was not a recognized
trade on its own, but an
occupation that had been up
until the 18th century,
traditionally held by women,
countless satirical prints
emerged, making fun of the
surgeon and his tools,
condemning this damaging
equipment. And the character
that you see here is actually
sold separately, but was the
frontispiece for John Blunt's
"Man Midwifery Dissected," a work
from the 1790s warning husbands
of the treacherous and torturous
animal that was the man
midwife, while also teaching
wives how to take back their
practice.
And just to be clear, the man midwife, 
or accoucheur in
French, as you see on screen,
was a surgeon.
The debate of whether surgeons
belonged in the birthing room
was a long one that many
feminist art historians have
unraveled the nuances of
already, including the specific
role of the forceps as
representative of the masculine
world of scientific knowledge
encroaching on the feminine
sphere of domestic medicine.
But I think it's also worth
thinking of the forceps as it
relates both visually and
linguistically, to the other
tools of the barber surgeon
who, like his counterpart man
midwife, stood in two separate
spheres of society.
Moreover, to return to this
slide with our accoucheur
macaroni. The macaroni was a
specific type of character that
emerged in the 1770s as a
figure that blurred class,
gender, and nationality.
As this other print here on the
right shows, hiding behind all
that hair and dress could
really be anyone, a country boy
aping high society in the same
vein as the barber surgeon
pretending he could hold his
own in the company of gentlemen.
So rather than thinking about
all these different modes of
visualization as separate
representations, we should be
thinking of them together for
what they were, a complex
rhetorical system that
capitalized on all these various
associations. And when you do
so, the surgeon and his tools
emerge as a particularly potent
reminder of the growing theories
on liberty and freedom of this
time.
Theories that would lead to
such wars as the American and
French revolutions. But before 
I get ahead of myself there,
let's go to the second category
I referenced,
in which we find prints not
only criticizing the surgical
field, but actually individual
practitioners within it.
So I've chosen to highlight
critiquing the individual
practitioner, this print of
William Hunter.
I think this really illuminates
the reason why a surgeon and not
say, a butcher, would become a
costume for politicians to adorn
in prints critiquing such
revolutions.
The caricature here alludes to
Hunter's willful display of
bodies to the public with his
lectures and new museum.
But this form of barbarity is
not why I chose this print.
The reason instead is how
Hunter truly is the poster boy
for how surgery could propel
one from a middling sort to
becoming the physician in
extraordinaire to the queen, a
fellow of the Royal Society, and
a professor at the Royal Academy
of Arts, knocking elbows as
much with the elite as he is
here with the dead.
And Hunter's path was similar
to what Campbell describes as
the ideal route to entering
surgery, and his trade
compendium. You get a
university degree, you study in
Edinburgh, although, notably,
Hunter went to Glasgow, and
travel to learn the latest
practices.
Now, while that is ideal, far
more normal was the other route
I have on screen here, seven
years of apprenticeship, which,
as we also saw, had a threshold
to entry with a minimum of 20
guineas, less money, but still a
lot to fork over at the time
because that was about a year
of a tradesman's income. During
the 18th century, to legally be
a surgeon in London, you had to
go one of these two routes.
This had to do with how the
freemen of the city operated,
where legally to practice, you
had to become a part of the
company. Yet the barbers
continued to bleed for a penny.
And fullers, smiths, joiners,
clothmakers, farriers,
butchers, all kinds of other
trades that used forceps too
performed minor surgeries,
particularly the drawing of
teeth, as you see here. The
reality is that many people
conducted surgery with and
without the consent of the
company of surgeons.
And important for our discussion
is how much the media loved to
poke fun at the company for
this, for the encroaching of
these other trades into their
practices.
As Ramberg shows in this print
here, we have a palatial hospital
that could be just as gruesome
as any barbershop in the poor
area of town, if not more so.
And Hogarth's print here "The
Company of Undertakers,"
It provides a fascinating view
into public perception of the
licensed versus unlicensed as a
contrast to the surgeons based
on the type versus the
individual.
The licensed-surgeon types show
no interest doing anything
really, but sniffing their own
canes, a common trope that
you've probably already noticed
in a couple other caricatures
already, and in today's
language, really think of it as
a person who loves to smell
their own farts, right?
These gentlemen in their wigs
stand huddled around as if
jostling to be heard, confirmed
by the text underneath, which
tells us how every consultant
has his own medical opinion. And
to remind us of their social
standing,
you also notice that they are
standing within a heraldic
shield. Above that heraldic
shield, however, stands three
other figures, these being some
of the most famous quacks or
unlicensed medical
practitioners of the 1730s when
this print was made.
We have here John Taylor, the
oculist, denoted by his discreet
physiognomy, the wink of his
eye, and the eye on his staff.
We have Sally Mapp in the
centre, born Sarah Whelan, also
known as crazy Sally, the bonesetter, 
shown with her club, and
Joshua Ward, who again with his
facial features, we can readily
point out, but also by the mask
that covers half of his face,
which is a nod to the birthmark
he had there.
And as an aside for the rest of
the presentation, I'm going to
be referring to Taylor and Ward
by their last names, and Sally by
her chosen first name, because
Mapp was the name of her husband
that she only had for a year,
and who cheated her of all her
money. So it just feels wrong
to me to be calling her Mapp.
But you might also notice
there's no other portrait of
Sally on this screen.
As far as we know, no official
one exists, and Hogarth's
depiction of her is the one
that follows her constantly,
such as Cruickshank's print
nearly a century later that
emphasizes the jester's
costume
Hogarth forces upon her. And
you might also notice, though,
where these individuals stand.
They are, of course, above the
heraldic shield, and this is
because these unlicensed
practitioners were true
celebrities of their day.
Their practices remarked upon
in the many newsprints that one
might subscribe to, and indeed
read at a local barbershop.
And many of these publications
sided with these so-called
quacks. Despite not being a
part of the company of
barber surgeons, these men and
women had, so to speak, the run
of the town. Sally often plied
her trade of bonesetting at the
Grecian coffeehouse, which was
a place where many of the Royal
Society frequented, including
Sir Hans Sloane, whose niece she
actually treated.
In fact, it is said that she
operated there at his request.
Taylor was known for his
charismatic lectures across town,
and Ward, after successfully
curing the king, were all before
him had failed, became the
king's consultant, opened a
hospital for the poor, and was,
by order of the king, unable to
be prosecuted by the College of
Physicians for his practices,
revealing another reason for
his mask.
The mask was a trope of the
18th century for the ability to
exist in two worlds.
It was often a feature of
masquerades, where an individual
would wear opposite sides of
their clothing, very similar to
what we actually saw with the
print of the man midwife, and
going to masquerade with one
side feminine
the other side masculine was by
far the most popular choice.
Ward's mask here indicates
likewise the extent to which he
traversed two planes, here of
high and low society.
Now at first glance, these
three above look just as
ridiculous as the men below
them.
Sally made out to be the most so
in her literal jester's costume.
Yet the print also requires us
to have knowledge of how these
three were actually received by
the public during this time.
A very popular verse in
connection with Sally gives us a
bit of a clue. And you, you can
see the Derry down there.
It's supposed to be sang to
the tune of-- Derry down, I'm not
going to do that. I'm going to
save you all that awful sound of
singing and just read it as a
poem.
"You surgeons of London who
puzzle your pates, To ride in
your coaches and purchase
estates, Give over for shame,
for your pride has a fall.
And the doctoress of Epson has
outdone you all.
What signifies learning are
going to school.
When a woman can do without
reason or rule.
What puts you to nonplus and
baffles your art for petticoat
practice has now got the start."
Hogarth's print then, fitting
with his other satirical works,
comments on the absurdity of
the medical trade, where anyone
can practice and make a name
for themself, and social
status and gender have no true
claim
when men of the elite are no
better than those from the
country who wear petticoats,
meaning women.
What's important to understand
is that during this time period,
if you had the means, you could
afford one of these men from the
company of surgeons, but a lot
of people actually couldn't.
And so, yes, you paid-- a
blacksmith to pull your rotten
tooth because they do it for a
penny, and you'd pay a barber to
bloodlet you, because they would
do it for a penny.
Moreover, even if you had the
means, as we saw, Sloane's niece
sought out Sally because Sally
promised and delivered on what
these educated men could not,
and also remind King George II,
chose Ward and not these
men.
Certainly we couldn't call
London a free market, but
medicine was something that the
general public took upon
themselves to understand in
order to make decisions on who
should be their practitioner,
and license didn't really matter
for them. Moreover, quackery
wasn't someone who operated
outside the bounds of proper
medical education.
It was rather outside the
bounds of what was deemed
appropriate by decorum.
Another satirical print of
these three, notably one of the
few other depictions of Sally
where she sits actually in the
background addressed by Taylor,
this reveals what actually
people were afraid of when it
came to the unlicensed
practitioner.
The text of this print
admonishes quackery as a whole
by defining it as a person who
lies about their background and
relies on exotic names and
fantasy to win over their
clients, rather than skill as
it should be.
Whereas Hogarth's work
recognized Sally, Taylor, and
Ward as individuals, what is
most interesting about this
other print is that though they
are named, they have now become
types associated with the worst
aspects of surgery.
And we know this because the
figures of Taylor and the men on
the left appear in an earlier
print.
While this figure represents
the French surgeon Jean-Louis
Petit in both prints, the
figure that was John Taylor is
now a certain Doctor Meager, a
character that is supposed to
stand in in this print not for
Taylor, but for a different
doctor, Saint André.
This was the doctor who
examined Mary Toft in that
famous case, and he was the
original one who vouched that
she did, in fact, give birth to
rabbits.
If you're not aware of that
story, you should definitely
look it up after this talk.
But for our discussion, this
Doctor Meager is based on a real
man that was neither Taylor nor
Saint André, but the French
doctor Misaubin.
Importantly, Misaubin was
trained and qualified to work in
both France and Great Britain.
And yet he too was lambasted as
a quack, particularly because of
his arrogance.
His standing in for Taylor,
then, is a nod to Taylor's own
education. Far from being
uneducated, as some literature
on quackery would have us
believe, Taylor's father was a
surgeon and he studied under
possibly the most lauded surgeon
of the 18th century, William
Cheselden.
The figure of Misaubin applied
to Taylor is to show us that
education actually does not
matter when it comes to
quackery. The quack is simply
one who advertises beyond their
means, claiming to be able to
do things that they really
cannot. And as eighteenth-century
viewers,
we are then not meant to read
this print on the left as simply
a retort against these specific
individuals, but about these
types of individuals,
to be wary of any peddler who
claims to have the secrets to
health rich or poor, educated
or not.
The figure of Jean-Louis Petite
confirms this reading, as Petite
was one of the leading surgeons
of France, appointing even the
first director of the Royal
Academy of Surgery there.
But before then, he was also a
member of the Royal Academy, and
in 1726, the year of this print
when it was produced, was the
time of his famous treatise on
bones that it was translated
into English, in which he
addresses the problem of the
quack bonesetters who thought
they could fix fractures without
proper understanding of human
anatomy.
So his presence then, is much
more fitting
in the 1736 print here to
legitimize Ward with his address
in hand, while ignoring the
practicing bonesetter in his
midst, crazy Sally.
But with that, the reuse of
Petit here, alongside all three
of our quacks as well as his
servant, reveals a deep-seated
anxiety beyond a quack
overselling their abilities,
which many practitioners did.
Instead
this anxiety, as hinted at
earlier, was the potential
overstepping of bounds, not
just of class and the  education tied
up with it, but identifiers
that were increasingly being
proposed as fixed throughout
the 18th century,
gender and race.
Much has been written on the
opportunities women would have
had in the job market,
particularly of the 17th
century, when medical pluralism
was even more the norm.
Women often took over family
businesses when their husbands
died, or even married into
trades for their skills, and
daughters, like sons, could
learn a trade from their
parents. Sally learned
bonesetting from her father.
Women whose fathers were
surgeons sometimes followed in
their fathers' footsteps, as
well as becoming licensed
surgeons in their own right.
This was in the late 17th and
early 18th centuries.
Yet by the 1730s, when Sally
was conducting minor surgery in
the Grecian coffeehouse,
rhetoric about women's place in
those establishments were being
questioned, and satirical prints
of coffeehouses show women more
often than not as participants,
not in intellectual debate, but
as servers of coffee and sex,
while more scholarship unveils
the history of women in
medicine, hidden behind these
satires, much less addresses the
history of the Black medical
practitioner at this time
something that, whether
intended or not, the figure of
Petit with his Black servant
brings to the fore.
Now in our history, the Black
servant is often written off as
another trope in portraiture,
or still lives, there to denote
the wealth of a white sitter or
patron,
as you can see here with a
painting that you can go see
right down the road.
And by no means am I implying
that this trope of the Black
servant as a symbol of white
privilege is not what is also
happening here, because it is.
But I was wondering why the
association in particular with
Petit. This is a scene that
would have never happened in
reality, but it did get me
wondering: why then 
include this child here?
A young man in the presence of
a renowned surgeon would usually
denote an apprentice.
The case in the earlier prints,
where the young son stands
behind as a
miniature of his father denotes
that he is being groomed for
the trade.
The Black servant has no such
marker of identification, and
yet he stands in a similar
position to Petit.
It's here where a bit more
history unfolds before us.
In the 18th century, both
Britain and France deemed
slavery in their colonies
imperative to the successes of
their respective nations, and
yet each had adages about
freedom within the boundaries
of their homelands that
complicated things
when enslavers decided to bring
those they enslaved back to
their English and French
estates.
The English had no clear law on
slavery, and so, many
contradictory court cases
ensued.
The French, however, did have a
law in effect by the time of
these prints in the 1720s that
stipulated enslavers could only
bring their slaves back to
France if they were to learn a
trade. If they were brought
under other pretenses, then
these individuals could
petition for their freedom.
So to see a young Black man
joined to Petit recalls the
many court cases that ensued in
France, and that would have been
reported back to London, in
particular, because Petit, not
being an enslaver, would most
likely only have a Black servant
if that servant were learning
from him.
It is also notable that in
Petit's "Treatise on Bones," he
stresses the need for servants
to help hold down patients,
effectively comparing his
servants to the itinerant bonesetters
of England like Sally.
The association between the
Black servant and Sally is
linked, then, not only through
their proximity on the page, but
through the practice of bonesetting 
itself and its official
and unofficial capacities.
This question of what type of
individual was allowed to become
an official tradesman was
widely discussed and portrayed
in the media in the 1720s and
'30s in London, with concerns
specifically to race.
In 1731, a new proclamation was
added to who could and who could
not serve an apprenticeship in
London, expressing that "no
Negroes or other Blacks be at
any time hereafter admitted into
the freedom of this city."
Freedom here, referring to the
official companies overseeing
the trades of London.
So, like our company of
surgeons.
This proclamation followed a
case in which a formerly
enslaved Black men had been
brought to London in the 1710s
to be baptized and apprenticed
as a joiner.
It was in 1731 that he had
finished his apprenticeship, and
would have been accepted as a
free man of the city to
establish his own practice.
However, there had been a
question on whether or not this
joiner named Satya even had the
right.
The aldermen ultimately voted
in his favor so that he could
become a joiner in the city,
but following the trial, they
inserted this language to
prevent any such case from
happening again.
At this point, you might be
wondering what any of this has
to do with forceps.
Well, a joiner like Satya and a
bonesetter like Sally would
have all used forceps as part
of their trade.
And like the blacksmith, a
joiner like Satya could have
offered other services like
drawing teeth and setting bones
to high and low society alike.
I will also remind that the
ability for so many people now
able to seek out and choose
their own medical practitioner,
license or not, was due to an
insurgence of wealth into the
city, wealth from the slave
trade.
In an age that was increasingly
concerned with justifying
slavery through false
statements about the inferiority
of people from Africa, the
possibility of a medical
caregiver being a Black person
must have engendered concern,
when already there was anxiety
over what freedom actually meant
for the privileged classes.
Now, one might argue that there
were so few Black people in
London in the 18th century that
this Black servant is once again
simply a trope of exoticism,
rather than a symbol of the
anxiety of an increasingly open
market of medicine, especially
when legally he would not have
been able to apprentice and
officially trade in the city.
Well, as I've shown, one could
get around these regulations
quite easily. But more
importantly, in the 18th
century, just because actual
Black people were not numerous
in Great Britain does not mean
their presence was not.
Anyone who has walked around
London has probably noted the
amount of locations that begin
with the word black.
When distributing their
handbills,
doctors and other tradesmen
played on this association by
using small black figures to
remind potential clients of
where to find them.
The reality was that the image
of a Black person was all around
London's marketplace already.
The fear now was that behind
that handbill, one might
actually encounter someone with
that skin color to trade with.
And to make this case, I'll
also remind of Frances Barber,
who is most known today as the
servant of Samuel Johnson.
But less recounted is the fact
that once free, Barber worked
for two years in the 1750s in
one of the most successful
apothecaries in London.
Writing on how slavery was
viewed in France during the 18th
century, Sue Peabody reveals
why figures like Sally and
Satya, and even Barber, would
have caused such anxiety during
an age obsessed with liberty.
She says, "The problem of
social hierarchies in a world
where all people are to be
considered free, i.e.,
not subject to others' domination
has yielded, on the one hand, a
commitment to an ideology of
absolute social equality, and on
the other, a system of
justification for why some
classes of individuals are
entitled to more privileges than
others." This is the ultimate
reason why I believe by the end
of the century, when taste for
caricature in public prints
emerges, that the
barber surgeon becomes a
powerful metaphor of modernity.
Embodied in these prints as male
and white, he is nevertheless
also a brutal degenerate type,
wearing the dress of gentlemen
while wielding the tools of a
workman. He is a costume for
politicians who are also elite
and male and white to wear in
order to reveal the moments when
they too slip down the moral
and social ladder into
barbarity. Surgeons, then, were
a unique representation of high
and low social status in one,
but also of the dangers of that
social mobility in a free
trade.
If a countrywoman working in a
coffeeshop could heal more
people than an academically
trained company man, what could
a formerly enslaved person do?
Though my investigation began
with a tool that I expected to
be about surgery's rise from
its tortuous past, I found a
wholly different narrative, one
invested in its tools of torture
so as to define which
individuals are entitled to more
privileges than others.
So I ask to conclude here, were
they really so torturous after
all? Thank you.
[Applause]