Book Tells Horror of 18th Century Surgery

Book Tells Horror of 18th Century Surgery

www.livescience.com

We all know medicine has come a long way in the past century. Now a 300-year-old guidebook, recently found on a dusty shelf, reveals how horrible things were way back then.

The book, written in 1712 and titled "Treatise of the Operations of Surgery," gives advice on such horrific procedures as amputations — before anesthesia was invented. The publication's discovery was reported today by the Daily Mail. Here are some of the gory details within, according to the British newspaper:

(visit the link for the full news article)

Eeww! We do have it good, this sounds like it came right out of "Supernatural!"

The article goes on to detail some of the procedures. Fascinating in a greusome way. It looksl ike some of their ideas (myrrh) were along the right lines, though in a very embryonic stage.

I just th ough I'd pass this on.

www.livescience.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by asmeone2


I bet passing boards was a lot eaiser then, though!!!!!

Not so surprising.
There were members of the fledgling field of medicine who practiced 'study' through vivisection.
This was the actual act of cutting into a human to study how their body worked while they were restrained, alive and conscious.
These surgeries were carefully done to keep the subject alive as long as possible and pretty much always ended in a drawn out agonizing death.

I guess we have it good right now.

I, myself, after visiting many poor countries know full well how easy we have it in North America.

Very good find. I love to read old out of print books. sandf

Peace
WR

[edit on 29-1-2009 by whiteraven]

if we start thinking all the # that this guys in the past did for us to get to this stage in medicine ... thats unbelievable ... how many people were murdered just for some guys to understand how everything works ... I am sure that the first guys were all #ing crazy ... how they got people to make all this things in the first place ... I doubt all of them were sick and in need of the" treatment " or torture tested ...

reply to post by Faiol


I think in most cases calling it murder would be kind of harsh. I do not know there is proof that they experimented on live subjects just to "further" thier knowledge! It may not have worked, it may have ultimitally killed thier patient but I do not think most "doctors" practicing at that time were malevalent, I do believe they were trying to help! There are plenty of cases where thier "tampering" actually made things worse with parturient fever for example, where they would go from one woman to another without washing thier hands and pass on the bacteria, typically killing the woman.

Even today some areas of human medicine do things that potentially do more harm then good, typically with normal physiologic processes such as child birth! Straping women to fetal monitors, augmenting labor and making them give birth on thier back, appears to lead to more complications then potential bentifits but they just keep doing it, even though scientific evidence shows it false! C-sections are NOT the easy way they are MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY! Yeah we have come a long way but we sure got a long way to go!

Good lord, we have it easy today..i rememebr my 8th grade history teacher, telling us during the civil war, many men had limbs amputated with no anesthesia... doctors would put tree branches, wood in thier mouth, so when the saw was used on aleg, he could bite down on hte object to ease the pain... and often men died on the amp-table, from the shock..some loked down and saw no more leg, passed out and never regained consiousness, others through the pianful process, simply died of shock the pain was to great for them to take..