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May 28, 2019
1842, when Crawford Williamson Long became the first documented doctor to use ether as a general anesthetic, in an operation to remove a tumor from a patient’s neck in Jefferson, Georgia. Unfortunately,
The surgeon thus began his evolution from an ill-trained technician to a modern surgical specialist in those first decades of the nineteenth century.
Liston—who reportedly had the fastest knife in the West End—achieved all this in just under sixty seconds.
Surviving the operation was one thing. Making a full recovery was another.
As it turned out, the two decades immediately following the popularization of anesthesia saw surgical outcomes worsen.
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.
It is little wonder that for Jack the Ripper, the “Liston knife” was the weapon of choice for the gutting of victims during his killing spree in 1888.
By 1788, there were 20,341 patients residing in forty-eight different hospitals around the city: an unprecedented number unmatched anywhere else in the world. A large percentage of these people would succumb to their infirmities. Because they were often poor, their bodies went unclaimed and fell into the hands of anatomists like Marie François Xavier Bichat, who reportedly carved up no fewer than six hundred bodies in the winter of 1801–1802.
“Not a single session has passed over our heads since I was appointed to my office among you, that has not paid its tax of life to the great Reaper, whose harvest is always ready, whose sickle is never weary.”
