The Love Surgeon : A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation

Dr. James Burt believed women's bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called "love surgery," a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into "a horny little house mouse." Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process. It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that's not the whole story. The Love Surgeon asks tough questions about Burt's heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn't he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action? The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation. "Dr. James Burt thought women were made wrong, but that he could make them right. Practicing in Ohio, Burt gradually altered episiotomy repair from the 1950s through the 1970s in order to, he claimed, enhance women's sexual responses. In 1989, in response to malpractice lawsuits, misconduct charges, and negative media coverage, Burt gave up his medical license. The media covering Burt in the late 1980s framed the story as a failure of obtaining informed consent and Burt as an outlier who should have been stopped by his peers. The Burt story raises these questions, and all concern professional self-regulation. They have not been satisfactorily answered, though they were, and remain, central to patient safety. By engaging with the complexity of what happened, A Not so Secret Surgery tells for the first time the absorbing - and at times unsettling - history of James Burt, his surgery, and his patients within the realities of professional self-regulation"-- Provided by publisher