The Conservative Tradition in British Thoracic and Cardiac Surgery 1900–1956

In: Social history of medicine, Band 33, Heft 3, S. 749-771

Abstract

Summary
Guy's Hospital was a major setting for the creation of heart surgery as a practice and speciality in immediate post-war Britain. Medical reformers of the twentieth century characterised much London hospital medicine as conservative and not organised for the production of modern research. Through the minutes of a hospital club formed to manage congenital heart disease, the paper explores how dynamic surgical research was carried out in an institution committed to traditional values and organisation. I trace the background to this development from around 1900.