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July 29 - August 11, 2019
Public dissections were theatrical performances, a form of entertainment as popular as cockfighting or bearbaiting.
Insanity that people would go watch this, but is it any different then people watching World Star videos or of executions online. You can find some pretty dark stuff on the internet when you look for it if people being hurt or maimed.
Liston was skeptical, though not enough to pass up an opportunity to try something new in the operating theater. If nothing else, it would make for a good show, something for which he was known throughout the country. He agreed to use it in his next operation, scheduled two days hence.
I love how some of these surgeons are performers.
It was not uncommon during this period for physicians to prescribe treatment without first performing a physical examination. Indeed, some dispensed medical advice through letters alone, never laying eyes on the patient in question.
That is true hubris
Liston could remove a leg in less than thirty seconds, and in order to keep both hands free, he often clasped the bloody knife between his teeth while working.
This sounds like a torture scene.
Liston’s speed was both a gift and a curse. Once, he accidentally sliced off a patient’s testicle along with the leg he was amputating. His most famous (and possibly apocryphal) mishap involved an operation during which he worked so rapidly that he took off three of his assistant’s fingers and, while switching blades, slashed a spectator’s coat. Both the assistant and the patient died later of gangrene, and the unfortunate bystander expired on the spot from fright. It is the only surgery in history said to have had a 300 percent fatality rate.
Lol this is great stuff
“Painful methods are always the last remedies in the hands of a man that is truly able in his profession; and they are the first, or rather they are the only resource of him whose knowledge is confined to the art of operating.”
This is still true today. Some of the best doctors try to not perform surgery or prescribe drugs. It’s much better to change your lifestyle to a healthier path.
“Now, gentlemen, time me!” he yelled. A ripple of clicks rang out as pocket watches were pulled from waistcoats and flipped open.
This guy is like a pro wrestler of surgery
The surgeon was very much viewed as a manual laborer who used his hands to make his living, much like a key cutter or plumber today. Nothing better demonstrated the inferiority of surgeons than their relative poverty. Before 1848, no major hospital had a salaried surgeon on its staff, and most surgeons (with the exception of a notable few) made very little money from their private practices.
Meanwhile today surgeons are some of the most highly paid individuals on the planet.
Later, he had managed to articulate the skeleton of a frog he had dissected after stealing a piece of wood from his sister’s cabinet drawer onto which he anchored the creature.
Today he would be considered a sociopath. Lol
As medical students became desensitized, they also became irreverent—much to the public’s horror. Pranks in the deadhouse were so common that by the time Lister entered medical school, they had become a mark of the profession. Harper’s
This is what happens to police and soldiers. This is the very reason we have such dark humor.
In December of that year, he purchased a complete human skeleton from his former roommate Edward Palmer for five pounds, which he paid off over the next two years.
I love the fact that you could buy body parts so easily back then.
That’s hardly a ringing endorsement when one considers that a hospital’s “Chief Bug-Catcher”—whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice—was paid more than its surgeons.
The pest control guy was paid more than the surgeon.
The surgeon James Y. Simpson remarked as late as 1869 that a “soldier has more chance of survival on the field of Waterloo than a man who goes into hospital.”
He also led a scathing attack on homeopathic medicine, which he argued was “perfectly untenable scientifically.”
Still an arguement today.
Contagionists were vague about the agent by which disease was passed. Some suggested it was a chemical or even small “invisible bullets.”
The beginings of the germ debbate. Sounds like the climate change debate.
When he asked her what was wrong, she groaned, “Oh, policeman, my life is in your hands; this man has stabbed me,” indicating her husband standing next to her. Instinctively, she put her hand on her abdomen.
This guy legit stood next to her whhile tallking to the police
This was an age in which matters of life and death constituted public entertainment.
Wow
Due to the mounting pressure of London’s overcrowded prisons, 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia between 1787 and 1857.
I so want to read a book about this
He was flayed meticulously, and his skin was used to make various macabre trinkets, including pocketbooks, which were hawked to a delighted, bloodthirsty public.)
What the fuck
All the while, the dog stared at him in horror, unable to whimper or howl in agony. Like Hooke, Lister saw vivisection as a necessary evil of his profession, one invaluable to his own research and to saving the lives of his patients.)
Holy shit they did that to a dog
“Every patient, even the most degraded, should be treated with the same care and regard as though he were the Prince of Wales himself.”
I see why they say he is the father of modern medicine
Reflecting the ideals of his faith, Lister believed that the greatest reward for a surgeon was the knowledge that he had performed an act of beneficence for the sick. “Shall we charge for the blood which is drawn, or the pain which we cause?” he asked his students.
Haha modern medicine
His behavior became so erratic and embarrassing to his colleagues that he was eventually confined to a mental institute, where he spent his final days raging about childbed fever and the doctors who refused to wash their hands.
The smartest man in the room was deemed crazy.
Thurston survived the operation and went on to live another twenty-two years, but many did not.
Insanely Horrific. I cant believe she survived.
He obsessed over the fact that so few surgeons had adopted his technique. An early biographer said that Simpson was jealous of everything that challenged acupressure: “Nothing, he thought, should be tolerated whose tendency was to continue the use of the ligature in amputations, after the superiority of acupressure had, as he believed, been established.”
Reminds me of the rivaly with Thomas Edison and Tesla
Surgery, he felt, should be safe whether it was performed on one’s dining table or in an operating theater, and antisepsis was the only viable solution when it came to operating in a patient’s own home.
Even he could be stubborn to change, but i doubt he could conceive the advances in technology.
Lister did not think that the whole of his profession would be (or should be) based in them; those with means, he believed, would continue to be treated outside institutional walls, in their homes or in private clinics.
He predicted correctly
