The Benefits of Psychological Surgery: John Scoffern's Satire on Isaac Baker Brown

In her study of mutilating surgical operations on women, Ann Dally drew attention to a pamphlet, The London Surgical Home, by John Scoffern, concerning the activities of the London obstetrician, Dr Isaac Baker Brown. As is now well known, Brown was the leader of a short-lived vogue for treating nervous diseases in women (especially epilepsy, catalepsy and hysteria), thought to be caused by ‘‘peripheral irritation of the pudic nerve’’ (masturbation), by means of an operation to remove the source of the irritation—that is, clitoridectomy. After enjoying a certain amount of celebrity in the early 1860s as the pioneer of an operation offering ‘‘a remedy for some of the most distressing cases of illness which [the clergy] discover among their parishioners’’, as the Church Times enthused, Brown ran into stiff opposition from his fellow obstetricians, and was expelled in disgrace from the Obstetrical Society in April 1867. Earlier studies of Brown have tended to place him within a tradition of patriarchal contempt for women and seen his activities as part of a mainstream obsession with controlling female sexuality, while later scholars have rather emphasized Brown’s relative isolation within the medical profession and the rapidity with which his fix was discredited—at least in Britain, if not in the United States. More recent studies have sought to place Brown within the context of a wider Victorian interest in