The EXTREMELY Painful History Of Anesthesia

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Though wartime surgery remained largely the same until after the US Civil War, it is usually movies about that conflict in which we see the nature of combat surgery before the understanding and acceptance of germ theory and widespread use of anesthesia. Usually, the hero of the movie is carried into a blood-stained canvas tent with doctors and orderlies wearing leather aprons. These aprons were water, or rather, blood-proof, and in Civil War hospitals, there was an awful lot of blood.

To give you an idea, at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864, a room in the private Carnton House was used as an operating room. Before the room was restored a few years ago, historians and scientists took the kind of black light you see on the TV show "Crime Scene Investigations" ("CSI") into the room. They found, 150 years after the battle, signs of horror – blood had coated the walls and even the room's high ceilings. That's not surprising, considering most of the operations performed there were amputations.

The wounded of both sides brought into Carnton House did not get anything to kill the pain. Perhaps the first few men got a shot of whiskey, but most of those still conscious had to make do with either biting down on a stick or Minie' ball bullet in a vain attempt to take their mind off the pain and to prevent them from biting through their tongue when the surgeon began to saw their arms or legs off. Those who survived were either crudely stitched up or had their wounds cauterized with a hot iron to try and stop the massive bleeding.

One thousand eight hundred years and more before that, a " trepanning " procedure was often used to lessen pressure on the brain caused by blunt force trauma or some illnesses. It was likely used to "cure" some mental diseases as well. Today, surgeons sometimes do the procedure to reduce pressure on or swelling of the brain, but the operation is much more successful, clean, and pain-free. You see, "trepanning" is the drilling or cutting of a hole in the skull. Archaeologists have found countless ancient skulls worldwide that show signs of trepanning.

#history #anesthesia #trepanning #ww2 #ww2medics #surgeryhistory

Scriptwriter: Matthew Gaskill

Video Editor & Motion Graphics: Jason Bohol

Voice-over Artist: Stephen Vox

Music: Motionarray.com & epidemic music

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