Imagine having an operation without anaesthetic. Before 1846, when the first procedure using pain-numbing drugs was carried out, this was was the norm. Hamfisted and brutal, surgeons cut patients open, cracked bones and tied up arteries while they were completely conscious. Not for the squeamish, a new book contains detailed images from rare surgical textbooks discovered from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
The gruesome images show eyeballs pierced, brains being sliced and feet being hacked off – and all without anaesthetic. The book, called Crucial Interventions, was drawn from The Wellcome Collection’s library, and narrated by medical historian Richard Barnett. The nineteenth century saw major advances in the practice of surgery, with techniques refined, illustrated in colour, and disseminated on the printed page for the first time.
Before this, the anatomist John Hunter described surgery as ’a humiliating spectacle of the futility of science’. Most patients died from post-operative shock, infection, or loss of blood, with the death rate after operations as high as 80 per cent in some London hospitals. Shown below are images, unnerving and graphic, yet beautifully preserved, giving a fascinating insight into the macabre world of archaic medicine.
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