Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic

Doyle, Jennifer

doi:10.2307/2902953

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Gross was called ‘The Nestor of American surgery’, ‘the father of American surgical research’ and ‘America’s first pathologist’, among other monikers (see Laios, 2018 ; Malkin, 2001 ; Toledo-Pereyra, 2006 ). His clinic has since been a site of scholarly interest and exploration, and it was depicted by Thomas Ekins in one of the most celebrated modern artworks in the US: ‘The Gross Clinic’, completed in 1875 ( Bamber, 1998 ; Doyle, 1999 ; Tucker, 2012 ).…”

Section: Case One: a Gross Breach (1852)mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A woman and now a man’: The legitimation of sex-assignment surgery in the United States (1849–1886)

Sudai

2021

Soc Stud Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Throughout much of recorded history, societies that assigned rights and duties based on sex were confounded by people with unclear sex. For the sake of maintaining social and legal order in those contexts, legal systems assigned these people to what they figured was the ‘most dominant’ sex. Then, in mid-19th century United States, a new classification mechanism emerged: sex-assignment surgery, which was imagined by some surgeons to ‘fix’ one’s physical and legal sex status permanently. Other surgeons, however, fiercely opposed the new practice. This article traces the controversy around sex-assignment surgery through three high-profile cases published in US medical journals from 1849 to 1886. Its central argument is that the more general effort to transform surgery into a scientific field helped legitimate the practice of sex-assignment surgery. Although such surgery was subject to intense moral criticism because it was thought to breach the laws of men and nature, over time, these concerns were abandoned or transformed into technical or professional disagreements. In a secondary argument, which helps explain that transformation, this article shows that surgeons gradually became comfortable occupying the epistemic role of sex-classifiers and even sex-makers. That is, whereas sex classification was traditionally a legal task, the new ability to surgically construct one’s genitals engendered the notion that sex could be determined and fixed in the clinic in a legally binding manner. Accordingly, I suggest that surgery became an epistemic act of fact-making. This evolution of the consensus around sex-assignment surgery also provides an early origin story for the idea of sex as plastic and malleable by surgeons, thus offering another aspect to the history of plastic sex.

show abstract

Section: Case One: a Gross Breach (1852)mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A woman and now a man’: The legitimation of sex-assignment surgery in the United States (1849–1886)

Sudai

2021

Soc Stud Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“… 9 The controversy surrounding The Gross Clinic is discussed by Henricks in ‘Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic’ and Doyle in ‘Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic ’. Mention should also be made of John Harley Warner’s study of photographs of American medical students in dissecting rooms from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographs, which he classifies as group portraits.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gentleman Artist-Surgeon in Late Victorian Group Portraiture

Hammerschlag¹

2013

Visual Culture in Britain

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article I consider the ways in which group portraits of surgeons, a genre associated with inscriptions of corporate membership and institutional authority, reflected the complex and at times contradictory status of surgeons during the late Victorian period. Group portraits from this period offer a diverse range of representations of surgeons – from middle-class professional to hygiene reformer, scientist to cultured gentleman – all of which worked against the popular conception of the surgeon as manual labourer and bloody carpenter. In particular, the emergence during the period of the gentleman artist-surgeon, exemplified by the celebrity surgeon and amateur artist Henry Thompson (1820–1904), signalled a new incarnation of the surgeon and offered an alternative to both the stereotypes of the surgeon as manual labourer and the surgeon or middle-class professional. But there were complexities and contradictions that beset the identity of the gentleman artist-surgeon, and these will be considered with reference to Thompson’s own novel, Charley Kingston’s Aunt (1885).

show abstract

Introducing Difficulty

2013

Hold It Against Me

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic

Cited by 9 publications

References 6 publications

‘A woman and now a man’: The legitimation of sex-assignment surgery in the United States (1849–1886)

‘A woman and now a man’: The legitimation of sex-assignment surgery in the United States (1849–1886)

The Gentleman Artist-Surgeon in Late Victorian Group Portraiture

Introducing Difficulty

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About