popularizing and legitimatizing the exploratory incision, was to
cause those who failed to resort to it, in doubtful eases, to be in
contempt of the court of higher medical opinion, and to license
those of a reckless, selfish, savage nature to play with human life
in a manner and with a freedom that would make a barbarian envious.

The wave of abdominal operations that swept the country in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century was appalling. The slightest pain
during menstruation, or in the lower abdomen, in fact every pain
that a woman had from head to toes was put under arrest and forced
to bear false witness against the ovaries. It was a very easy matter
to trump up testimony, when real evidence was embarrassing, to
foregone conclusions; hence pains in obscure and foreign parts took
on great importance when analyzed by minds drilled in the science of
nervous reflexes, sympathies and metastases.

Normal ovariotomy (removing normal ovaries for a supposed reflex
disease) swept the whole country during the eighties and threatened
the unsexing of the entire female population. The ovaries had the
reputation of causing all the trouble that the flesh of woman was
heir to. Oophorectomy was the entering wedge, since then everything
contained in the abdomen has become liable to extirpation on the
slightest suspicion.

Those surgeons of greater dexterity or savagery, I can't tell which,
prided themselves in operating on the more difficult cases. Taking
the ovaries out was a very tame affair compared to removing the
uterus, tubes and ovaries; hence the surgical adept embraced every
opportunity for an excuse to remove everything that is femininely
distinctive.