Abstract
During the 18th century, the reinvention of French surgery as a 'monarchical profession', in the words of Toby Gelfand, enabled the creation of an elite surgical knowledge from which uninstructed participants could be excluded. A link can be made between the types of resources used by surgeons to present themselves as expert healers, and the epistemological strategies of the operation. The sickbed was the scene of a performance, in which every actor's movements were described and constrained; the end product of an extended process of social negotiation, surgical training, physical restraint and submission.
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