How did people get surgeries done before anesthesia was invented? How were they able to stay still and not move around during the procedures?
There’s no way people could just grit their teeth and feel being cut, could they? The pain alone had to make people act out.
In: Biology
Watch The artful dodger. It has some of the surgeries displayed well, and it’s a fun series otherwise.
Anesthesia wasn’t so much invented as it was rediscovered by western medicine. There are plenty of medicines that were used throughout history for their numbing effects but in more “modern times” doctors decided that pain was somehow part of the healing process and stopped using them. Eventually they realized this was wrong and started searching out anesthesia medicines again.
Tied down. Drunk. Unconscious from the injury or consequences of the injury. Drugged.
The surgeon and his crew would render you immobile (or at least as immobile as possible) for the surgery they were performing, but obviously this is limited in where they can work on.
Tying an arm or a leg down is easy as these things go, so surgery to work on a damaged arm or leg is fairly easy. Stopping someone’s torso from moving around – or parts of it moving around – is much harder.
It’s worth watching the artful dodger series on Disney plus. That seems to actually depict how it was done back in the day, plus the series is entertaining 😂
In John Adams biography they talk about his daughter Nabby having breast cancer and getting a mastectomy. (Tw: graphic) >!They held her down while the doc literally lopped off her breast and then cauterized with an iron.!< She died within 2 years anyway.
Ever hear of the phrase “bite the bullet”?
Hold them down. Don’t let them chew off their own tongue. Get in and out as fast as possible.
It’s also worth mentioning that many more advanced surgeries were developed AFTER the advent of anesthesia. Not many thoracic or abdominal surgeries took place. It was mostly amputations and tooth removals.
Local anesthesia is kind of recent, but anesthesia as a whole wasn’t discovered yesterday, there’s a lot of natural alternatives, surely not as effective, but still sort of effective
I remember an episode of Radiolab where they did a segment on this. Everyone in the operating theater was in awe of the silence because every operation before that the patients were screaming bloody murder.
I think thats basically what happened….I’ve heard other stories where they got people drunk…and since alcohol is a blood thinner I dont think that worked out too well either.
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