What did people do before anesthesia? - Sally Frampton

Trace the history of anesthesia from the 3rd century to today, and explore how doctors performed surgery before anesthetic drugs.

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The quest for anesthetics that could induce unconsciousness and enable more meticulous surgeries began around the early 3rd century CE. Before anesthesia was widely used, patients had to consciously endure every moment of surgery. So, what methods did doctors use before modern medicine caught up? Sally Frampton traces the history of anesthetic drugs.

Lesson by Sally Frampton, directed by Alexander Hellebaut.

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[matheusGMN]

this is one of the reasons why, for most of history, you sometimes had better odds trying to outlive the disease than going to the doctor, thank science for modern anesthesia!

[hprofile]

As a doctor, I must say that anesthesia is the greatest invention in the field of medicine.

PS it's an opinion, not a fact: you can disagree as opinions can vary person to person.

[JackieOwl]

As an infant, I was operated on over and over without anesthesia. It was believed as late as the 1990s that babies didn’t need anesthesia. It took a long time to unpack why I was afraid of my neck and abdomen being touched when I was young until my mom recalled seeing me in the OR cut open and screaming.

[rafaelperalta]

As someone who has undergone 3 surgeries already, I'm glad anesthesia exists. Also, the anesthesiologists I've met during those procedures have that calming persona. They assured me everything's gonna be fine, and told me to relax. That helped me ease my nervousness. I bet most of them are like that. 😊

[kidtruck]

I remember when i got my wisdom teeth out, i counted down from 100, got to probably about 97 before waking up and thinking, "Man, my face hurts. Hopefully, they can still get my teeth out." Drugs are no joke, even if it's laughing gas.

[davidrenton]

they missed the best thing about Robert Liston, in one amputation he managed to kill 3 people, a spectator had a heart attack after being narrowly missed with his knife, he accidently cut his assistant finger who alongside the patient died from an infection because he didn't clean the instrument.

Apart from that he was still considered one of the best sturgeon of the time, as due to the speed (he could amputate a leg in 2.5 minutes) he lost only 1 in 10, where the average at the time was 1 in 4.

[lohphat]

Some people:

"I wished I lived in a simpler time before all this technology..."

Me:

NOPE

[spaceaxolotl]

I am so thankful that I did not have to endure the pain of doctors Praying my bones apart halfway through my hand to remove a tumor without anesthesia. I just fell asleep and then I woke up

[EEE-]

They used a neat little thing called big rock.

[amgm]

The video was a rollercoaster for me: it started horribly painful, then histerically funny, then things got serious when the inequality of the time were exposed. Job well done, ted ed!

[zeph_os]

I had surgery a week ago on my collarbone to get a plate installed. I didn't even know when they administered the anesthesia, I was just cracking jokes with the surgeons as they strapped me in, and the next thing I remember, I was in the patient recovery area with a big bandage on my shoulder and a loopy feeling. It's amazing how far modern medicine has come

[JesusMartinez-rrry]

You uploaded this video at the perfect day. After I had a surgery to have a hammer toe straightened, I had thought about what if I lived back in the day when there's no anesthesia. Even something as small as straightening a hammer toe would have resulted in massive amounts of agonizing pain. Anesthesia is definitely something we should never take for granted.

[parismilane]

I had surgery without anesthesia. My insurance wouldn’t pay for it and I didn’t have the money. So, they had a nurse talking to me the entire time— and I was there cursing her out. But she encouraged me not to move — saying “you are doing well. Almost finished. Great job.” And so on.

[ScottJPowers]

I've experienced a bit of this myself. A couple times, dentists want to drill out a small cavity in one of my teeth and insist I don't need any anesthesia and one time in an ER I was at because I cut a finger on a mandolin slicer, they had to cut of a bit of partially severed flesh but insisted they didn't need to numb it with anything. In all of these cases, the pain was very intense. In the ER, I almost passed out after they cut that bit of skin off.

[ouch]

Anesthesia (from the patient’s perspective) is a baffling experience. If you’ve never experienced it, I hope you never do. We say that it’s “going to sleep” but the experience is nothing like sleep. When sleeping, you have at least some feeling that time has past. With anesthesia, it’s like someone just edited a section out of your life. It feels instantaneous, even if you were out for days. I’ve only had one surgery that was several hours long. I felt as if i instantaneously transported from the OR to the recovery room. It was very strange and disorienting. Because of the pain meds, I genuinely had no idea they’d actually done the surgery. I had to sit up and look at my leg to make sure something had been done. Of course, a few hours later when the pain meds wore off, there was no question something had been done.

[katherineheasley]

I had a surgery last year under general anesthesia. Considering the amount of pain I was in when I woke up, I'm super glad I didn't have to have the operation without it!

[Sarcastix]

This is fascinating but the star of this lesson is the animation. It's amazing

[shevetlevi]

I was an anesthesiology resident for 6 months at the Miami VA hospital at the beginning of my career and saw about 2-3 surgeries per day. Surgery is an absolute assault on a body and wouldn't be possible without modern anesthesia. From what I've read in the Civil War era the attribute of whether or not a surgeon was good was pretty much how fast he was.

[clawmachinez]

I catch myself complaining a LOT about the current times we’re in or the generation I was born into but then I remember all the surgeries I’ve had in my life coupled with my extremely low pain tolerance;
I would have never survived a trip to the ER without anesthetics. The pain alone would be a death sentence.

Thankful to be born when I was in the mid 90s!
Modern anesthetics and

[SomeoneCommenting]

The most amazing thing that I find about anesthesia is how you transcend time and space and in just one nanosecond a long time has passed and you had absolutely no sensation of it. This is VERY different from sleeping, because you can always feel how much time you were asleep. When you sleep your body is still aware of sounds, feelings, you can detect light changes through your eyelids, etc. But with anesthesia is just Poof! Nothing ever happened. You crossed instantly into another dimension in the future with no sensation at all. If you've never had anesthesia, you've been missing a really cool experience.