For Fear of Pain

Dr Peter Stanley is Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s national military museum. He is one of Australia’s leading military historians, publishing mainly in Australian and British military history, including The Remote Garrison, Tarakan, White Mutiny and Alamein: the Australian Story. For Fear of Pain is his fourteenth book.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsPrologueIntroduction: ‘Painful, difficult, bloody, tedious and dangerous’1 ‘Surgeons and operators’: The Surgeons’ World2 ‘Modern surgeons’: Medical Knowledge and Surgery3 ‘Capital operations’: Major Surgery4 ‘A hard set of butchers’?: Wartime Surgery, 1793-18155 ‘In process of cure’: Hospitals and Surgical Healing6 ‘Gennelmen!’: Medical Students7 ‘The living subject’: Surgeons and Patients8 ‘The cutting part’: In the Operating Room9 ‘Our little patient’: Surgeons and Children10 ‘Fortitude’: The Patient’s Experience of Surgery11 ‘The rights of pain’: The Acceptance of AnaesthesiaEpilogue‘Long fixed in the memory’: The Legacy of Painful SurgeryImage CreditsBibliographyIndex

”…an excellent and useful book.”- in: Wellcome History, Vol. 29, 2005“…innovative historical focus […] eloquent descriptions […] More clearly than in any other historical account, Stanley delineates and substantiates the “inescapable tension” that surgeons faced…”- in: The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 78, 2004“…a very valuable and interesting book.”- in: Health and History, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2003, pp.156-158“…this book is a well-organized graphic account told with humility and intense feeling for all those facing ‘The Fear of Pain.’”- in: Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2004, pp.195-19