In recent years, intellectual property in medicine has generated much debate, becoming one of the most significant issues in modern day medical ethics and linking in with wider discussions about the commercialisation of medicine and the commodification of the human body. Recent high-profile cases in the USA have centred on gene patenting, that having been enthusiastically practised by universities and biotechnology companies, is now having its legality questioned. The unexpected March 2010 ruling of a federal court against Myriad Genetics, which invalidated the company’s patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, has highlighted the complexities that now govern the ethical and legal tenure of asserting property rights over biological material.1 These events provide an ideal opportunity for historians of medicine to strengthen their engagement with what we recognise today as ‘intellectual property’.2 While historians of science and technology have produced a wealth of literature on the subject,3 medical ideas and procedures, understood in a more clinical sense, require further disentangling from this broader scope, not least because, as I intend to show here, medical practitioners’ experiences of intellectual property can be so vastly different from that of other professions. Such concerns have realised themselves in my own work looking at developments in British surgery in the nineteenth century, a period during which there was heightened interest in the social role of the inventor. Christine MacLeod has identified a growing cult of heroism around inventors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, centred on figures such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, George Stephenson and James Watt, and the highly visible and influential products of their labours. The impoverished inventor became the heroic Briton, heralded for making an important contribution to national industry.4 From the 1850s, major discussion ensued as to the extent to which inventor’s rights should be legally enshrined, and numerous legislative changes over the next thirty years resulted in patent laws which served to strengthen patentee rights.5 Medical practitioners were notably absent from these debates. While some commentators hinted toward dissatisfaction with the lack of protection or reward for intellectual labours in medicine,6 discussions of inventor’s rights in the media rarely referenced medicine and the profession appeared reluctant to open itself up to the debate. When patenting was discussed within the pages of the medical journals, it tended to be with suspicion and disdain. For many, there was discordance between property rights and medicine, an inherent contradiction in permitting excessive individual reward within the framework of altruism which increasingly bound orthodox medical culture together. Scottish physician William Gairdner claimed to voice the view of many in 1868, stating his belief that there was: A principle now firmly established in the medical profession... that the status of its members is considered lowered by any attempt to establish property in any remedy, or other invention for the relief of disease; whether by concealment, or by patenting, or otherwise advertising the invention for the benefit of its presumed owner.7 Much of the focus was on the popularity of so-called ‘patent medicines’ – patented or trademarked drugs, often luridly advertised, which grew in popularity in Britain towards the end of the century8 - but interwoven within the anti-patenting sentiment was a moral bent which implied that careful negotiation was needed when attempting to establish ownership around an invention or innovation, even if it didn’t involve patenting. For, regardless of the moral stance, credit disputes arose frequently and publicly in medicine. In the next section, the controversial operation of ovariotomy is presented as a short case study of the complexities that could emerge during these negotiations.