Horatio Robinson Storer was a surgeon and anti-abortion activist in the 1800s who worked in the field of women’s reproductive health and led the Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion in the US. Historians credit Storer as being one of the first physicians to distinguish gynecology, the study of diseases affecting women and their reproductive health, as a separate subject from obstetrics, the study of pregnancy and childbirth. Storer was one of the first physicians to successfully perform a Caesarian section, or the removal of the fetus through a surgical incision, followed by the removal of the woman’s uterus, a procedure which would later be known as Porro’s operation. Storer was also an anti-abortion activist who believed that public attitudes toward abortion were too relaxed and that the laws did not effectively punish what he deemed to be the criminal act of abortion. Historians credit Storer with leading the Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion, which they consider largely responsible for the increase in laws criminalizing abortion in the late 1800s.

Lewis Albert Sayre was an orthopedic surgeon who practiced medicine in New York City, New York, during the second half of the nineteenth century and held a number of leadership positions in his profession. Over the course of his nearly fifty-year career, Sayre developed a number of surgical and nonsurgical treatments of bone problems including scoliosis and other forms of spinal curvature, club foot, and hip-joint disease resulting from tuberculosis infection. He also helped popularize circumcision, or surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis, as a treatment for a variety of medical conditions, including muscle paralysis and epilepsy, based on the theory, discredited as of 2025, that a chronically irritated foreskin could lead to diseases in other parts of the body. By providing a medical justification for circumcision, Sayre helped to embed the surgical procedure within US medicine, even as the medical rationales for its use would change periodically in the decades that followed.