The risk and dire results on which surgeons gambled their patients’ lives were clear, yet the normal ovariotomy continually found support from gynecologists prominent in the trend of radical and experimental surgeries, including John Marion Sims.

Sims himself even pushed Battey to refer to the procedure as ‘Battey’s operation’ instead. Women and Madness in the 19th Century. These scandals in particular, along with persistent opposition from institutions including the Medical Board for the Women’s Hospital in New York, were instrumental in the downfall and eventual disgrace of the surgery. And in the process of masculinizing reproductive health, they solidified gendered assumptions and eugenic conceptions of female weakness of the mind and body, attributing the “irritable uterus” to mental illness, hysteria, and erratic behavior in women.

That even the opposition to the surgery was rooted in a belief that a woman’s purpose was only to reproduce and raise children shows how deeply gynecological practices were entrenched in misogynistic and eugenic thought.

Mania, dementia and melancholia in the 1870s: admissions to a Cornwall asylum.

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[3] Charcot's theories of hysteria being a physical affliction of the mind and not of the body led to a more scientific and analytical approach to hysteria in the 19th century. Yet surgeons, including Battey, would perform these surgeries on women who had none of these diagnoses.

Sims and his experiments represent a trend in radical and medically unjustifiable gynecological procedures that emerged in the mid-19th century.

In the 1890s, George Rohé from Maryland examined 35 women of 200 patients, and he recommended the surgery in patients with a variety of mental illnesses, such as hysterical mania and puerperal mania (now associated with modern postpartum depression), who were clearly unable to consent to the procedure. But the 19th-century Romantics, especially in France, embraced the madness and sexuality of Ophelia that the Augustans denied. 19th century medical views on female sexuality ‘the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind’: from William Acton’s medical text, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs , 1857. Infamously performed on those unable to consent, the normal ovariotomy is the removal of non-diseased ovaries. Battey outlined only four conditions he deemed appropriate for the surgery to the American Gynecological Society in 1877: when an absence of a uterus endangered life; irreparable damage to the uterine cavity or vaginal canal; epilepsy caused by uterine or ovarian disease; and cases of physical and mental suffering associated with the menstrual cycle. The existence of such a surgery, despite the lack of medical necessity and documented success, shows how misogynistic, eugenic thought informed gynecological practices as the field became incredibly masculinized in the 19th century.

The audience views this incident as implausible and simply part of Sondheim’s twisted, non-historically accurate version of nineteenth century London.

Ruth A. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery and Rape Legislation in Comparative perspective (Routledge: Ashgate Publishing, 2008). She discusses the growth of asylums during the 19th century and examines the bases upon which women were incarcerated.

Since at least the late Renaissance, menstruation and insanity had become intricately linked in Western medicine, and Battey, working within this tradition, claimed that insanity was “not infrequently caused by uterine and ovarian disease.” The normal ovariotomy, then, became a medically legitimate procedure to “relieve” women of their madness and to prevent them from passing it on to offspring.