Description:

Sarah Rodriguez, PhD
Lecturer, Medical Education
Lecturer, Global Health
Faculty, Medical Humanities & Bioethics Graduate Program
Member, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities

A ‘Non-Standard Practice of Gynecology’: James Burt’s ‘Love Surgery’ and Questions about Routine Medical Innovation

In the mid-1950s, obstetrician gynecologist James Burt began modifying episiotomy repair. By the mid-1970s, Burt began offering what he called ‘love surgery’ as an elective to women, while continuing to perform it on his obstetric patients. Burt practiced medicine until early 1989, a few months after a group of women upon whom he had performed love surgery accused him on national television of performing an experimental surgery on them without their informed consent. After this negative exposure, Burt was pressured to give up his medical license. The Burt story received a good deal of local and national media attention following the television show, and the stories typically followed the same theme: that Burt performed an experimental operation on trusting women without their consent and that other doctors in the community knew about it but did nothing. This narrative frames Burt as a freakish physician practicing outside the norms of medical practice, one allowed to do so by his peers. But this narrative fails to include questions about routine medical innovation the Burt story brings forth. In this paper I unpack the dominant narrative of Burt and consider his development of love surgery within normative surgical development, routine medical innovation, and within the historical context of the clinical practice of informed consent for routine procedures since the 1950s.