Playing Surgeon: Children’s Toys and Games Involving Surgical Procedures

In 1964, a University of Illinois student invented a children’s game that entailed removing body parts from a “patient” on an operating table. John Spinello sold the rights to his invention to toymaker Milton Bradley for five hundred dollars and a job in industrial design once he graduated. Initially released in 1965, the game Operation introduced children and adults to “Cavity Sam” whose large red nose lit up when a player accidentally touched the edge of the opening when trying to remove a body part. Operation was not the only game that featured surgery. Board games featuring popular television surgeons (Doctor Kildare and Ben Casey, M.D.) also proved popular with both parents and children. Using advertisements and materials from toy manufacturers and toy industry research groups, this paper analyzes the popularity of these games and the ongoing enthusiasm for toy doctor and nurse kits in Cold War America. The surgical divisibility of the body and its parts, this paper argues, readily resonated with larger structural changes that produced a new orientation in relationships between parents and pediatricians, and doctors and patients more generally.