Surgeons of the late nineteenth-century were fascinated by the process of knowledge-making that had occurred in their field over the previous half-century. Developments in antisepsis and laboratory science as well as radical changes in operative techniques contributed towards a collective identity where surgeons imagined themselves as both history-in-the-making and the future. With the opportunities afforded by the turn of the century for reflective thinking, this period saw a substantial project among surgeons to historicize their recent work through lectures and publications which were notable for emphasising a circularity between medical culture, biography and history. “Can we to-day believe” commented the physician Lionel Weatherly in 1898 in reference to one of surgery’s most important innovations, ovariotomy, “that it was only a comparatively short time ago that the benches of the Royal Medical And Chirurgical Society rang with excited cries of ‘Down with the Belly-Rippers!’?” Weatherly’s comments suggest how surgeons put contemporary knowledge to work – in this case knowledge of ovariotomy’s progressive path to acceptance - to make incomprehensible what had come before. Nonetheless far from constructing only simplistic, positivist accounts, such sentiments were often countered by an apprehension as to where the future of surgery lay and a desire on the part of many surgeons to look back at the past decades both nostalgically and for guidance on the future. Was it possible for there to be too much surgical knowledge? And if this was the case, was it detrimentally affecting surgical practice?

While Victorian scholars in other fields have begun to re-assess the late nineteenth-century as a crucial period in historiography, in the history of medicine it generally remains dismissed as a time of celebratory accounts of doctors’ triumphs and thus of little intellectual value (calling into question the continued separateness of ‘history’ from the ‘history of medicine’.) In particular Victorian histories of surgery tend to be viewed as the gloating of triumphalist surgeons. This paper argues for a re-evaluation of that period. Rather than assuming the history of surgery at this time to be a whiggish pursuit entirely separate from academic historians’ intellectual agenda, I instead show how the surgical profession tried to make sense of the numerous recent innovations that had occurred in their field. For surgeons, ever caught between theory and performance, historicization presented much needed clarification and perhaps even a surgical philosophy.