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November 28 - December 5, 2023
Medical voyeurism was nothing new. It arose in the dimly lit anatomical amphitheaters of the Renaissance, where, in front of transfixed spectators, the bodies of executed criminals were dissected as an additional punishment for their crimes.
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.
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.
The best that can be said about Victorian hospitals is that they were a slight improvement over their Georgian predecessors. 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.
In 1825, visitors to St. George’s Hospital discovered mushrooms and maggots thriving in the damp, dirty sheets of a patient recovering from a compound fracture. The afflicted man, believing this to be the norm, had not complained about the conditions, nor had any of his fellow ward mates thought the squalor especially noteworthy.
Most surgeons were interested in the individual bodies of their patients, not hospital populations and statistics. They were largely unconcerned with the causes of diseases, choosing instead to focus on diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.
Between 1800 and 1850, there were more than two hundred recorded cases of wife sales in England. Undoubtedly, there were more that went unreported.
almost all the hospitals in London except the Royal Free controlled inpatient admission through a system of ticketing.
hulks, or floating prisons, on the Thames. The
did mercury cure anyone?
1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby.
brittanica cites an earlier case
And so he began subscribing to what was known in the 1860s as the “cleanliness and cold water” school of thought, which drew analogies between the tarnishing of silver and the infections caused by bad air. Advocates of this philosophy knew that if a person dipped a spoon in cold water, it would delay the formation of a sulfide coating. Using that same logic, they thought that by boiling water and letting it cool before washing both the instruments and the wound site, a surgeon could prevent postoperative infections from developing. Their emphasis on cold water specifically was meant to
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In fact, in several American hospitals, Lister’s techniques had been banned; many doctors saw them as unnecessary and overly complicated distractions because they had not yet accepted the germ theory of putrefaction.
When linen and cotton were scarce, army surgeons used cold, damp earth to pack open wounds.
As the years passed, there was a gradual shift in medical procedure from antisepsis (germ killing) to asepsis (germ-free practices).
