Brilliant, volatile and invariably male, the surgeon stereotype is a widespread and instantly recognisable part of western culture. Setting out to anatomise this stereotype, Cold, hard steel offers an exciting new history of modern and contemporary British surgery. The book draws on archival materials and original interviews with surgeons, analysing them alongside a range of fictional depictions, from the Doctor in the House novels to Mills & Boon romances and the pioneering soap opera Emergency Ward 10. Presenting a unique social, cultural and emotional history, it sheds light on the development and maintenance of the surgical stereotype and explains why it has proved so enduring. At the same time, the book explores the more candid and compassionate image of the surgeon that has begun to emerge in recent years, revealing how a series of high-profile memoirs both challenge the surgical stereotype and simultaneously confirm it. -- .

The Cancer Problem offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America. The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

Work in all its guises is a fundamental part of the human experience, and yet it is a setting where emotions rarely take centre stage. This edited collection interrogates the troubled relationship between emotion and work to shed light on the feelings and meanings of both paid and unpaid labour from the late 19th to the 21st century. Central to this book is a reappraisal of 'emotional labour', now associated with the household and 'life admin' work largely undertaken by women and which reflects and perpetuates gender inequalities. Critiquing this term, and the history of how work has made us feel, Feelings and Work in Modern History explores the changing values we have ascribed to our labour, examines the methods deployed by workplaces to manage or 'administrate' our emotions, and traces feelings through 19th, 20th and 21st century Europe, Asia and South America. Exploring the damages wrought to physical and emotional health by certain workplaces and practices, critiquing the pathologisation of some emotional responses to work, and acknowledging the joy and meaning people derive from their labour, this book appraises the notion of 'work-life balance', explores the changing notions of professionalism and critically engages with the history of capitalism and neo-liberalism. In doing so, it interrogates the lasting impact of some of these histories on the current and future emotional landscape of labour.

The Cancer Problem offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America. The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

Work in all its guises is a fundamental part of the human experience, and yet it is a setting where emotions rarely take centre stage. This edited collection interrogates the troubled relationship between emotion and work to shed light on the feelings and meanings of both paid and unpaid labour from the late 19th to the 21st century. Central to this book is a reappraisal of ‘emotional labour’, now associated with the household and ‘life admin’ work largely undertaken by women and which reflects and perpetuates gender inequalities. Critiquing this term, and the history of how work has made us feel, Feelings and Work in Modern History explores the changing values we have ascribed to our labour, examines the methods deployed by workplaces to manage or ‘administrate’ our emotions, and traces feelings through 19th, 20th and 21st century Europe, Asia and South America. Exploring the damages wrought to physical and emotional health by certain workplaces and practices, critiquing the pathologisation of some emotional responses to work, and acknowledging the joy and meaning people derive from their labour, this book appraises the notion of ‘work-life balance’, explores the changing notions of professionalism and critically engages with the history of capitalism and neo-liberalism. In doing so, it interrogates the lasting impact of some of these histories on the current and future emotional landscape of labour.