The Woman in the Surgeon's Body (review)

About a decade ago Joan Cassell published an anthropological study of surgeons that, among other things, beautifully captured their masculine subculture. 1 When she first began to observe them at work in 1983, there were only a handful of women in the field. Since then, however, those numbers have increased tenfold and are still rising. Such an extraordinary change in a specialty so long a bastion of male privilege has enabled Cassell to return to the subject of surgeons for a fascinating second look. This time around she is interested in gender, wanting to know whether and in what ways women practitioners differ from men. The result is a complex but readable account that will appeal not only to historians of medicine but also to theorists and scholars of difference. Unlike her research for the previous book, where Cassell could observe the entire surgical staff in depth at only a few hospitals, she has struggled this time with more daunting logistics: since there were rarely more than one or two women surgeons at any institution, she had to visit a large number of cities and sites to observe and interview the thirty-three women who eventually became the subjects of her study. We are all the richer for her efforts

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