Morbid Fact Du Jour For January 31, 2010

Today’s Excrutiating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Where sheer physical brutality was concerned, there was little in Victorian society that rivaled the professional medical act of surgery. Lacking any form of anesthesia beyond opium or alcohol – both of which could only be applied in moderation, given their side effects – surgical procedures were functionality indistinguishable from the most grievous forms of torture. Surgeons prided themselves on their speed above all else, since extended procedures were unbearable for both doctor and patient. Procedures that would now take hours to complete were executed in three minutes or less, to minimize the agony. One surgeon boasted that he could “amputate a shoulder in the time it took to take a pinch of snuff.”

In 1811, the British author Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy in Paris. She described the experience in a letter to her sister a year later. After drinking a wine cordial as her sole form of painkiller, she settled into the ominous closet that had been assembled by the team of seven doctors in her home, lined with compresses and bandages and gruesome surgical tools. She lay down on the makeshift bed, and the doctors covered her face with a light handkerchief. “When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast, cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves, I needed no injunction not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision, and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! So excruciating was the agony… I then felt the knife tackling against the breastbone, scraping it! This performed, while I remained in utterly speechless torture.” Before passing out in near shock after the procedure, she caught a glimpse of her primary doctor – “pale nearly as myself, his face streaked with blood and its expression depicting grief, apprehension, and almost horror.”

Culled from: The Ghost Map