Care, Discipline, and the Politics of Visibility in Allied Surgical Histories, 1870-1945.

Abstract

Allied operating theaters between 1870 and 1945 were sites of surgical innovation and military urgency. This study argues that they functioned as infrastructures of power. It reconceptualizes the operating theater as an ideological formation where authority is spatially choreographed, emotional discipline institutionalized, and professional legitimacy unevenly distributed. Advancing three central claims, this inquiry argues that architecture and photographic composition functioned as epistemic practices that produced and reflected hierarchy. Second, it shows that emotional labor operated as institutional governance, regulating comportment, reinforcing hierarchy, and shaping professional recognition. Third, it contends that archival absence constitutes evidence of epistemic exclusion. Hiring policies privileging British birth and Christian affiliation structured access to care roles, while ward placements, military recruitment criteria, and publication networks shaped whose care entered the historical record. Methodologically, this inquiry adopts an intensive, relational narrative approach, triangulating personal narratives, administrative records, and institutional photographs across Canadian, British, American, and Scottish contexts. Treating storytelling as epistemic production, it reads tonal rupture, irony, compression, devotional framing, and strategic silence as evidence of nurses' negotiation of constraint. Foregrounding nurses' testimonies, this study reframes allied surgical history as terrain where space, affect, and archive converge to discipline and differentially recognize care, offering a critical re-reading of surgical modernity and calling for historiographies attentive to the infrastructures that produce visibility, authority, and memory.