Surgery, Skin and Syphilis

Daniel Turner’s prolific writings provide valuable insight into the practice of a commonplace Enlightenment London surgeon. Examining his personal, professional, and genteel achievements. Enhances our understanding of the boundary between surgeons and physicians in Enlightenment ‘marketplace’ practice. Turner’s pioneering writing on skin disease, De Morbis Cutaneis, emphasizes the skin’s role as a physical and professional boundary between university-educated physicians who treated internal disease and apprentice-trained surgeons relegated to the care of external disorders. Turner’s career-long crusade against quackery and his voluminous writings on syphilis, a common ‘surgical disorder’, provide a refined view into distinction between orthodox and quack practices in eighteenth-century London.

Philip K. Wilson, MA (John Hopkins University) and Ph.D. (University College London) recently joined the 'Great Books' faculty at Shimer College in Waukegan, Illinois after having taught the history of science at Truman State |University in Kirksville, Missouri. He edited the five-volume, Childbirth: Changing Ideas and Practices in Britain and America from 1600 to the Present (Garland, 1996). Currently Wilson is pursuing biographical research on the Swiss-American geologist and geographer, Arnold Guyot and American eugenicist, Harry Laughlin. Wilson lives with his wife, Janice, and sons, James and Douglas, in Libertyville, Illinois.

”This is a well-researched and exceedingly informative book …”
in: Social History of Medicine, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2001