Today, clockwork and surgery. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
Cutting into the human body
is terrifying business. Yet our neolithic
forbears did brain
surgery. Indian surgeons operated on
cataracts 2000 years ago. And the cesarean
section, as its name suggests, goes back at least
to ancient Rome. But early surgery was limited by
pain and infection, and neither could be helped
until the mid 19th century gave us anesthetics
Still, the clockwork rationalism of the 18th
century triggered a new view of surgery. Just as
a clock could be taken apart and repaired, so too
might the human body. The science of anatomy was
scarcely two centuries old, but now physicians
and surgeons tore into the body with renewed
purpose. The broken spring, the worn gear, should
be fixable. Anatomy leapt forward as a science;
and all kinds of new operations were attempted.
Let's look at one:
Peter Camper, born in 1722, learned carpentry,
design, and painting as a lad. Then he went to
Leiden University to study medicine. He entered a
field newly claimed by men. He became one of the
new man-midwives who
brought their new tools to the birthing process
and displaced women midwives. Camper's early
training made him a ready candidate for clockwork
rationalism thinking. He went on to become a
well-known physician, with his hand in every
aspect of anatomy. It was Camper who suggested
replacing the conventional cesarean operation
with something called a symphysiotomy.
The purpose of a cesarean is to deliver a baby
when it's badly presented to the birth canal.
Midwives had many subtle tricks for turning and
repositioning the child. Failing that, the only
solution was to cut into the womb, remove the
baby, and sew up the wound. In the 18th century,
that was terribly painful. Then the mother
survived only if she threw off the inevitable
Camper tried a new operation on pregnant pigs. He
cut the cartilage between the pubic bones. That
enlarged the birth passage and let the piglets
through. Camper never tried it on a human, but
Jean Sigaud de LaFond, the son of a French
Sigaud de LaFond brought his own clockwork
thinking to surgery. His French biographer
credits him with a talent for self-promotion. He
made money writing popular science books, which
another biographer calls vulgar -- catering to
popular taste. In 1777 Sigaud Lafond did the
symphysiotomy operation on a woman and got away
with it. In fact, the operation doesn't guarantee
getting a baby out, as a cesarean does. He got a
gold medal, but the operation quickly died out.
So the clockwork doctors of the clockwork age
took their new knowledge of anatomy to the
operating theatre with mixed results. Camper's
wife died after a radical breast cancer operation
in 1776. He went into a depression and took up
politics. Sigaud Lafond lived to the age of 80,
but all the fame he'd sought came to rest on one
experimental operation that medicine soon put
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Lindeboom, G.A., Camper, Peter (Petrus). Dictionary of
(C.C. Gillespie, ed.), New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974.
Bough, J.B., Sigaud de LaFond, Joseph-Aignan.
Dictionary of Scientific Biography (C.C.
Gillespie, ed.), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974.
Michaud, J Fr Joseph, Biographie Universelle Ancienne
et Moderne. Paris, Madame C. Desplaces, 1854-.
See entry under Sigaud de LaFond, Jean-René.
[Note: Sigaud de LaFond's first name is given as Jean in
all the French literature and in most references to him.
Much of the medical literature identifies him simply as
Schiebinger, L., The Mind Has No Sex? Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1989. Chapter 4, Women's
Traditions. (This chapter includes discussion of the
18th-century man-midwife movement.)
I am grateful to Drs. Stanley Reiser and Frank Moody,
University of Texas Medical School, for their
considerable counsel on the implications of the
For more on ancient surgery, see: Majno, G., The
Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. For more
on early cataract operations, look up the works of 16th
century surgeon Ambroise
Paré in your library.
The pubic bones are the two arms of the pelvis that meet
at the front center of the picture above, and which are
joined by cartilidge. The pelvic bones define the
near-circular passage through which the baby must pass.
The symphysiotomy operation involves cutting that
cartilidge and prying the pubic bones apart to widen the
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2004 by John H.