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
They held your ass down. Source: Had to have a chest tube placed for a chest wound / collapsed lung while in the field. Had several guys hold me down. It was unpleasant. They had an IV going and hit me with some Vercet (spelling?) as I recall, and some other shots I think, but the memories are hazy. I definitely remember being held down by a lot of dudes. One held my head still, one across my legs, one on each arm, one holding torso steady while last one cut and tubed me. After the tube was placed I started coughing and blacked out.
Early surgery was mostly just a surgeon cutting off your arm or leg while one or two strong men held you down. You might be given a thick piece of leather to bite down on.
Later, they’d usually use some form of opium for the pain, but not enough to really knock you out, because you’d very likely not wake up again. Many surgeons thought that opium was too much of a risk, too.
Oh, and you also had a pretty fair chance of dying from infection, too, even if you survived the surgery. It was not a good time to be seriously injured.
My great-great grandfather fought in WWI. He was a stretcher bearer and often times the guy who held you down during field surgery with little or no anesthesia. It was not pretty….
There was a very excellent episode of the podcast Radiolab. I just listened to that covered the subject. It’s called “Black Box”.
It discusses three topics, but the first is about the advent of anesthesia. It briefly describes what surgeries were like before anesthesia was developed. It was really interesting to hear that operation theaters were placed in hospitals in such a way as to minimize the sound of screams throughout the rest of the hospital.
From there, it discusses what a mystery it was to medicine what actually took place in the brain when patient was knocked out from anesthesia. There were even instances where, although the physical body was completely disabled, consciousness would return to the patient and they would be conscious through the surgery.
Fortunately, we now have better technology to monitor brain activity while people are under.
Also worth noting is that different cultures definitely had various versions of anesthesia. Poppy milk which is the starting point of opiates or even alcohol we’re pretty common
They were tied down or held down. It’s pretty well documented how brutal these surgeries were.
Nobody “held still” while their limb was amputated
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