In the 1850s, an American surgeon Dr J. Weldon Fell appeared in London claiming to possess a new cure for cancer. Soon after his arrival in the metropolis in 1856, he applied to the Middlesex Hospital's cancer ward to trial his treatments on the patients held within. The surgical staff wrote up their assessment of his trial in their minutes before publishing it as a separate volume. This article will look at this account alongside another description of Fell's treatment, written by the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse and focusing on his wife, Emily Bowes Gosse. It will ask what purpose these textured narratives of pain served and what they can reveal to us about the dynamics of Victorian femininity and masculinity in the context of incurable disease. I will consider the accounts provided by surgical staff of the Middlesex Hospital and Philip Henry Gosse and interrogate their use of female suffering in their constructions of scientific masculinity and professional identity. Finally, and in line with the themes of this edited collection, I will show how male surgeons positioned themselves as expert analysts of their female patients’ pain, as well as how gendered attitudes towards the suffering experienced by individual women are inextricable from broader ideas about social class.
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