Amputation: A Dramatic Act

Attendees are invited to visit the Hunterian Museum from 5:30-6:45pm before the talk starts.

Contemporary representations of surgical operations in Britain in the eighteenth century are rare.

A recently recovered oil painting, stolen from the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in the 1980s, provides a unique visual record of the practice of surgery in Britain in the mid-1700s but more than that it tells a very particular story…

Set in an operating theatre it depicts a male patient, in abject agony, undergoing the amputation of his left leg surrounded by, what appear to be, medical men. Attributions from the 1960s set the scene in the men’s operating theatre of St Thomas’s Hospital, London. Dawn’s talk presents compelling new evidence about the who, what, where and why of the painting and its importance in highlighting the social networks connecting medicine, the arts, theatre and the nobility in eighteenth century London, revealing it to depict one of the centuries most famous amputations.