Robert Richardson, The story of surgery: an historical commentary, revised edition, Shrewsbury, Quiller Press, 2004, pp. vii, 304, illus., £25.00 (hardback 1-904057-46-2).

I have fond memories from graduate school of the first edition of this work; it, like this new edition, is an engagingly written story of the innovations which made twentieth-century surgery a safe and widely accepted therapeutic modality; it contains virtually all “the old, old stories that we love to hear” and was a favourite of one of my teachers, Dr Owen Wangensteen. I have subsequently learned much more about the history of surgery and historiography and could, in good conscience, only give it to my graduate students as a case study in how not to do history. However, I still recommend it to medical students and surgical residents as an easy way to learn something about the heritage of their profession. In the same way that Galen, in Anatomical procedures, argued that anatomy had different uses for different practical interests, stories of the past have different utilities for different professions. The original and the second edition of The story of surgery begin the story with the advent and impact of anaesthesia. The story of the last third of the nineteenth century continues in both volumes with Lister, early abdominal interventions and asepsis. The classic story of appendicitis and appendectomy is told in both editions. The last decade of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth are considerably extended in the second edition—hernia repair, cancer, and early neurological surgery are all expanded from the original; gynaecological surgery is exceptionally enriched. The story continues through the two world wars and chest surgery, but the second edition contains more on heart surgery, arterial repair and transplantation, stories just begun in 1958. All in all the new text is a very workman like job of updating and expanding the stories told in the earlier book. In the preface the author tells us, “The two big differences in this new edition are, first, the addition of new material which has increased the length by about a third, and second, the inclusion of the bibliographic sources, missing from its previous manifestations.” My copy of the first edition is the 1964 Collier paperback, published as The story of modern surgery, new and revised, a reissue of the 1958 original entitled The surgeon's tale; it has no critical apparatus but does contain an appended bibliography; two pages long, listing a collection of secondary sources from which the book was essentially drawn. This bibliography is, I think, fairly named. The bibliography has disappeared from the second edition and in its place we find 41 pages of “Sources”, connected to the text by superscript numbers as if they were notes from which the text was crafted. These are the “primary sources” of the material described at the point where the superscript number occurs in the text but there is no evidence that they were consulted by the author. There are statements in quotation marks scattered through the text which have no superscript number associated with them and for which no source is identified. I suspect I could, if pressed, identify the majority of the secondary sources from which the new material in the texts is constructed but they are not to be found in the “Sources”. I can only assume that the “Sources” were superadded from one of the excellent bibliographies of surgery available—perhaps Garrison-Morton, listed in the bibliography of the earlier addition. In addition to the historiographic limitations of the critical apparatus, the book is a chronicle of contributions to surgical progress. It does not deal with the issues of patient autonomy and social justice now recognized as a critical component of the medical profession's social contract as well as being the heart and soul of the important questions of the new social history which has had a profound impact on the field since the 1960s. How did these contributions become widely available while assuring quality care? How was access to the advance made possible? How was competence adjudicated? What was the professional responsibility of these innovators? are among the questions which cry out for discussion in these stories, but they cry out in vain. There are occasional lapses of judgment, where the writing outruns the data, e.g., Pasteur “discovered bacteria” and Halsted “introduced” the surgical residency, but on the whole the book is as accurate as the existing secondary sources. Richardson faithfully tells the stories he has chosen to tell. I still enjoyed the read, the stories are the ones loved by my surgical colleagues and as heritage they cannot hurt anyone; but as history they are too limited to help anyone.