The "Belle Epoque" of Surgery: The Life and Times of Theodor Billroth (review)

If there is a single place and period at which it can be said that gastrointestinal surgery had its birth, it must surely be the Second Surgical Clinic of the University of Vienna between 1867 and 1894. It was here that the grand Geheimrat, Theodor Billroth, inspired and trained a generation of talented disciples in the methods of investigation and technique that would lay the groundwork for virtually all that would follow.

And in corollary fashion, if there is a single author of whom it can be said that he, above all others, has tirelessly tracked the record of Billroth’s life, it must surely be Karel Absolon. Working from letters and papers seemingly unavailable to or unplumbed by others; maintaining a close relationship with several surviving members of the great surgeon’s family; and visiting, it would seem, every site of significance where Billroth so much as trod, Absolon has produced an archive that is by far the most accessible and voluminous source available to English-speaking readers who would delve deeply into the biography of this most driven and gifted man of exquisite sensibility, and even perhaps of genius.

The result of the author’s single-minded devotion to his subject has been a long series of articles and monographs dealing with various aspects of Billroth’s multifaceted personality and his accomplishments in surgery, pathological anatomy, medical education, musicology, philosophy, and humanism. The crowning achievement of Absolon’s undertaking is the four volumes of The Surgeon’s Surgeon: Theodor Billroth, 1829–1894, published by the Coronado Press between 1979 and 1989. Since the appearance of the final number in that series, new material has been found, and Absolon has felt called upon to take up pen yet once more, “urged by my colleagues” to do so “at the time of the 100th anniversary of Billroth’s passing as an introduction to the earlier more extensive work, containing sources, the extensive bibliography of the surgeon and on the topic, as well as an index of names and subjects” (p. 5).

And there’s the rub. In the tortuosity of this single quoted passage can be found one of the reasons that readers of Absolon’s prose have so much difficulty with his writings. Given better editing and proofreading, such convolutions in his literary voice and sentence structure would have been straightened, his numerous idiosyncratic asides and interpretations might have blended more smoothly into the text, and there would certainly have been far (far, far) fewer typographical errors and unconventional—not to say peculiar—choices of language. These are problems that have plagued all of Absolon’s books. Although it must be said that they are less evident in this volume than in previous works, they not only remain distracting, but occasionally serve as sources of confusion.

The book might also have been helped by a good fact-checker. One wonders how a historian as authoritative on the life of his subject could be so careless about many other facets of the undertaking. For example, to illustrate the rapidity with which the thirty-eight-year-old Billroth had, within months of arriving in Vienna in 1867, “penetrated to the top of the social and professional ladder, in a typically Viennese ‘gemütlich’ [note the quotation marks around the italics] way” (p. 83), Absolon has Gustav Klimt being “intrigued” by him in December of that year, and states that the artist “depicted him in one of his early realistic paintings” (p. 83?>): Klimt was five years old in 1867. The painting in question was done in 1888, and shows Billroth sitting as one of a large audience at Vienna’s Burgtheater, a white-bearded and prematurely patriarchal figure. In stating that he “would characterize Billroth as a Quaker-like freethinker,” Absolon badly mistakes (he is, of course, hardly alone in this error) the theology of the Religious Society of Friends, whose belief in...