What I do is me/for this I came
Okay, this is not a World-Shattering Historical Discovery, but nonetheless it gratified me.
I am currently looking into a mid-Victorian case of medical awfulness which is now well-known and positively iconic about Dreadful Victorian Docs, but at the time it was all pretty hushed, outside the fierce hoohah that went on inside medical societies and medical journals, because professional omerta.
(There is, my dearios, a wider argument weaving through the longer paper about the medprof doing that, and striking off the Register anyone who dared to communicate e.g. matters concerning contraception to The Multitude for 6d a go, instead of pontificating at medical conferences and eventually publishing a tastefully bound volume at a guinea or so, for Ye Profession Onlye.)
Part of the hoohah was because the central figure had, perhaps, been a little over the line in self-promotion, as well as getting himself in dutch with the Commissioners in Lunacy.
But I discovered, quite by chance, while looking through that somewhat passe work, Pearsall's The Worm in the Bud (1969), one of the early works on the seething morasses of Victsex, that he mentions a certain bizarre divorce case, in the course of which the wife (whose sanity was in question, as to whether she could actually have consented to the match) had 'a mysterious operation' performed on her, unknown to the husband, by Doc Now Famed As Avatar of Victorian Medical Monstrosity. Except that Pearsall did not seem to have sussed this.
So I went and looked the divorce case up in the British Newspaper Archive and it was the sensation of early 1867, being reported the length and breadth of the realm - mostly in terms repeated from one journal to another. And while the operation may have been mysterious to Pearsall, the husband referred to it as 'a most cruel, he might say barbarous operation'.
Having stroppy correspondence with the Commissioners in Lunacy appearing in The Times was one thing: I think having his name mentioned in a high-profile divorce case doing the ethically dodgy thing of operating on a wife without telling her husband (there were relatives in the picture, the whole thing was ripe for Victorian AITA) in a cruel and barbarous manner might have been felt to be bringing The Profession Into Disrepute, Something Must Be Done.
I.e. beyond argifying about his practices and ethical standards. Massive meeting of a medical society specifically to expel him. But this contextual detail has, as far as I know, not previously been mentioned in the historiography of the case.
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