Publication date: 1 June 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781806550999
Number of illustrations: 28
Learning to Cut
Surgical training and practice, 1450–1800
Maria Pia Donato (Editor), Elaine Leong (Editor), Tillmann Taape (Editor)
Across early modern Europe, surgeons played a key role in the provision of everyday healthcare. They dressed wounds, lanced boils, set bones, treated tumours, as well as performing specialist operations such as couching cataracts or cutting for the stone. They carried out anatomies and autopsies, prepared corpses for embalming, and, if they were entitled to do so, occasionally performed major operations such as removing cancers, amputating limbs, and trepanning skulls. Yet, while recent studies have done much to elucidate the work of surgeons, little has been published about how they were trained.
Learning to Cut fills this significant gap. A range of case studies from the French, Italian, German, and English contexts reveal diverse modes of surgical teaching and learning in early modern towns and cities, and how they were shaped by existing social, economic, and occupational structures. Equally varied were the spaces and institutions where prospective practitioners learned and experienced surgery. Thus, the shop, the patient’s house, the hospital, the guild hall, and the anatomy theatre were all sites for learning, teaching – and cutting. The chapters present rich narratives of education and, together, shed new light on the practice of early modern surgery.
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: learning to cut and cutting to learn
Maria Pia Donato, Elaine Leong, and Tillmann Taape
Part I: Diversity of knowledge and practice
2 Learning to cut for the stone: training specialised surgeons in the Holy Roman Empire
Annemarie Kinzelbach
3 Learning to dress wounds: seventeenth-century Italian surgeons and their pharmaceutical competence
Sandra Cavallo
4 Surgical training and practice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany
Michael Stolberg
5 Leonardo Fioravanti, a (more) learned surgeon: surgical techne and the critique of anatomy
Cynthia Klestinec
Part II: Genealogies of surgical education
6 Learning surgery from medieval manuscripts
Peter Murray Jones
7 ‘The ordinary terms of chest wounds’ or how to become a forensic surgical expert in early modern France: evidence from a seventeenth-century surgical corporation notebook
Cathy McClive
8 ‘Trained up & now made apt to practise’: vernacular print and surgical training in early modern London
Elaine Leong
9 ‘His body, his honour, his health, and his handwork’: surgical training in printed books and in the city of artisans
Tillmann Taape
Part III: Epistemic modes and strategies of training
10 Learning from disaster: surgical mishaps and pedagogy in the age of print
Heidi Hausse
11 Teaching with images: Guglielmo Riva’s surgical pedagogy in seventeenth-century Rome
Silvia De Renzi
12 Entangled sites of pedagogy: André Levret’s Parisian midwifery course
Scottie Hale Buehler
13 ‘Proficient in all things surgical’: apprentices learning and doing in Italian hospitals, 1670–1770
Maria Pia Donato
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781806550999
Number of illustrations: 28
Publication date: 01 June 2026
PDF ISBN: 9781806550999
EPUB ISBN: 9781806551002
Hardback ISBN: 9781806550975
Paperback ISBN: 9781806550982
Related titles
Learning to Cut
Surgical training and practice, 1450–1800
Series: Opening up the History of Science
Publication date: June 1, 2026
Open Access PDF ISBN: 9781806550999
Paperback ISBN: 9781806550982
Hardback ISBN: 9781806550975
Trim size (hardback): 23.4cm x 15.6cm
Trim size (paperback): 23.4cm x 15.6cm
Across early modern Europe, surgeons played a key role in the provision of everyday healthcare. They dressed wounds, lanced boils, set bones, treated tumours, as well as performing specialist operations such as couching cataracts or cutting for the stone. They carried out anatomies and autopsies, prepared corpses for embalming, and, if they were entitled to do so, occasionally performed major operations such as removing cancers, amputating limbs, and trepanning skulls. Yet, while recent studies have done much to elucidate the work of surgeons, little has been published about how they were trained.
Learning to Cut fills this significant gap. A range of case studies from the French, Italian, German, and English contexts reveal diverse modes of surgical teaching and learning in early modern towns and cities, and how they were shaped by existing social, economic, and occupational structures. Equally varied were the spaces and institutions where prospective practitioners learned and experienced surgery. Thus, the shop, the patient’s house, the hospital, the guild hall, and the anatomy theatre were all sites for learning, teaching – and cutting. The chapters present rich narratives of education and, together, shed new light on the practice of early modern surgery.
