by the Hospital Senses Collective
In the early nineteenth century, surgeons set about cataloguing tumours, malignant sores, and cancerous growths. They described with vivid detail the different wounds they encountered in their clinical practice. The pictured account from 1811 illustrates the form of the tumour developing beneath the surface, growing to the point of breaking the surface of the skin, and rupturing the body. The abscess causes the skin not only to break, but punctures and destroys it, so that the skin moves and sloughs to make space for the mass. This process is damaging, infected, and has a ‘frightful appearance’ that cannot be ignored, while emitting an unbearable stench of infection and disease.
Medical men of this period were perhaps more in touch with their feelings than they are today. Clinical texts were replete with the emotions evoked by the sensory experience of surgery and care. Effective treatments for the type of abscess described here were rare, and malignant tumours were often left to their own devices. Patients frequently only sought professional attention when the suffering became too great or the smell became too bad. From this description we get a sense of how the surgeon must have managed their own emotions in such a context, and worked to override their disgust at both sight and stench. Nothing stood in between the surgeon and the patient’s body: neither gloves nor masks. Tonally, the surgeon was distant from the patient, recommending ‘its removal’ in a way that depersonalised his subject. There were power dynamics where the patient ‘submitted’ to the knowledge of the surgeon. However, it is worth remembering that this text comes from the surgeon’s pen. Patients actually exerted plenty of agency when it came to deciding when to seek out surgical attention and what treatment they received from these newly-professionalising practitioners.
So much has changed since 1811. Cancer patients are more likely to be diagnosed well before their tumours rupture through the skin and surgeons can now erect barriers between themselves and the effluence of the body, using face shields, aprons, masks, and gloves. However, some things remain the same. Medicine is still messy. Doctors, surgeons, nurses, cleaners and carers still encounter putrid smells, foetid flesh and excrement. Our twenty-first-century bodily responses to the extract above might well have much in common with those of Georgian men and women. However, our sensory image of hospital medicine has perhaps shifted. We associate it with cleanliness, cleaning fluids and strictly sanitised spaces (especially operating theatres). There is a greater distance between sensory reality and popular perception. We might come ill-equipped to the hospital, either as workers, visitors, or patients. We are often unprepared to handle the disgust human bodies still have the capacity to evoke, prompting us to have undesired and uninvited affective responses.
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