The Backstory: 10,000 Years of Surgery With No Anesthesia

Have you ever thought about what surgery would have been like before the advent of anesthesia? Doctors did everything from amputations to mastectomies to tooth extraction with almost no pain relief for the patient. Their secret was speed, and their assistants were the original men in black.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, have you ever had surgery? Stitches, broken bone,
or even a tooth pull? Human beings have been dealing
with those kinds of painful traumas for thousands of years now.
Try to imagine what any of that would have been
like before anesthesia. I'm Patty Steele, when surgery involved a
room full of dressers, a lot of speed cutting, and

(00:21):
pretty much no pain relief. That's next on the backstory.
The backstory is back. The first known surgery was actually
a leg amputation thirty one thousand years ago on a
little boy on the island of Borneo. There were primitive
brain surgeries eight thousand years ago, and then in the

(00:43):
past four thousand years everything from c section berths to
plastic surgery. A little over two hundred years ago, the
first successful hysterectomies took place. All of that without anesthesia. Now, honestly,
it wasn't until the nineteen hundreds that you were more
likely to survive surgery than to die during it, or
worse yet, die because of it. So what about the pain?

(01:07):
The first actual anesthetic only arrived about one hundred and
eighty years ago. It was ether, and it offered reliable,
pain free surgery for the first time in human history.
But all those treatments and surgeries that came before had
to happen for the most part, without anything to relieve
the pain except maybe a bit of liquor. And how

(01:27):
did that go? Well? Some cultures did have a few
recipes for pain relief. Six thousand years ago, the Sumerians
used the opium poppy, which of course is how morphine
is made. And two thousand years ago an iconic Chinese
doctor Hua Too mixed up and anesthetic for his patients
that may have included cannabis, wine, and wolf spain, which

(01:49):
has a really powerful but sometimes deadly neurotoxin in it.
Then about twelve hundred years ago in Persia, doctors developed
what they called a soporific sponge the name of the
what was it? It was a bundle of rags that
were soaked in a cocktail of man drake, hen bane
and wine, oh also more opium. They'd hold the bundle

(02:11):
under the patient's nose until they induced what they called
the great rest. But Eastern medicine, like those examples, was
way more advanced than Western medicine in Europe when it
came to pain relief. You got to grit your teeth
for these stories. In eighteen eleven, an English novelist named
Francis Burney was living in France. She was fifty nine

(02:32):
years old when her doctors told her she had breast cancer.
The only way she would survive, they told her, was
with a mastectomy. There was no surgical anthesia at that point,
and she dreaded the idea, but she said later it
was the only choice. Plenty of women had gone through it,
so she agreed. Now it's the morning of her surgery,

(02:53):
September thirtieth, eighteen eleven. The men in black, three doctors
and three dressers as the assistants were arrived at her home.
Francis is blindfolded and she lies on a bed. Then
the dressers do their job. They have to physically restrain Francis,
holding her down while the surgeon works as quickly as possible.

(03:15):
Francis later said the pain was so intense she lost
consciousness twice, which did give her a little bit of relief.
She wrote a graphic description of when she went through
to her sister. I won't share that because it gets
pretty wild, but amazingly the operation was a success. Francis
Burney recovered and lived almost another twenty nine years, dying

(03:36):
at the age of eighty seven. Pretty amazing, although they
don't really know for sure. She actually had breast cancer.
That's what they suspected because of the lumps. For surgeons
operating without anesthesia, speed was everything. The longer a patient
was on the operating table, the greater the chance they
would die from either blood loss or shock. Amputations were

(03:59):
the true test of any great surgeon. They were celebrated
for their speed, because the quicker the surgery, the better
the survival odds. By the nineteenth century, doctors knew they
had to perform an amputation of an arm or a
leg within twenty five seconds to best keep the patient alive.
Imagine losing a limb in under thirty seconds, but the

(04:20):
doctor's reputation hung on it. In the eighteen forties, the
famous British surgeon Robert Liston would race into his operating
room in London and shout, time me, gentlemen, time me.
He would cut open a patient's leg with a straight
knife and saw straight through the bone in twenty five seconds.
Onlooker said that to save time, he held the bloody

(04:41):
knife in his teeth yikes. Stat show that five out
of six of Liston's amputees survived, but being one of
his dressers was not an easy job. During one amputation,
doctor Liston worked so quickly he accidentally cut off the
fingers of one of the dressers holding the patient down
a Both the patient and the dresser died from infections,

(05:03):
and a third person just watching the operation actually died
of shock. Other doctors used hypnotism, coca leaves, and the
aforementioned booze, but medical historians say one of the most
important moments in human history was the development of pain
relief in the mid nineteenth century, though sadly not really

(05:23):
in time for battledfield surgeries during the Civil War. But
when the super fast London surgeon, doctor Liston, first got
some ether in December of eighteen forty six, he used
it to sedate a patient undergoing a leg amputation. When
the patient woke up after the operation, he looked at
doctor Liston and said, when are you going to begin?

(05:46):
Hope you like the backstory with Patty Steele, Please leave
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you'd like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele
and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The

(06:10):
Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group,
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steele and
on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the

(06:33):
Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know.