Also..."in 1846 a dentist named William T.G. Morton used ether to allow Dr. Henry J. Bigelow to partially remove a tumor from the neck of a 24-year-old patient safely with no outward signs of pain. The surgery took place at Massachusetts General Hospital in front of dozens of physicians. When the patient regained consciousness with no recollection of the event it is said that many of the surgeons in attendance, their careers spent hardening themselves to the agonizing screams of their patients while operating without modern anesthesia, wept openly after witnessing this feat. At the time, no one knew how ether worked. We still don’t. Over the last 173 years, dozens of different anesthetic gases have been developed and they all have three basic things in common: they are inhaled, they are all very, very tiny molecules by biological standards, and we don’t know how any of them work." Source
Prior to this surgery was absolutely hellish. In 1750, anatomist John Hunter described surgery as ‘a humiliating spectacle of the futility of science’ and the surgeon as ‘a savage armed with a knife’. The death rate after surgery was exceedingly high: 1 in 4 deaths in some of the better hospitals. If you could afford it, opium was often used to dull pain, as was rum, or mulberry and lettuce. Some people opted for a more direct approach and were knocked unconscious with a hit to the head.
Even in more modern times, anesthesia at times would “not be available” in the Soviet Union for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries, and was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.
No comments:
Post a Comment