Until the middle of the 19th century, surgery was performed with no anesthesia. You don’t need a fertile imagination to realize how excruciating the experience was for patients. Nor did the surgeons who administered this particular type of torment take it lightly.
In The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain, Thomas Dormandy tells how the 19th-century surgeon and medical pioneer Sir James Paget recalled those gruesome days before anesthesia in his memoirs: “They had been the worst nightmares. I can remember them still. Even now, they sometimes rouse me from my sleep. I wake drenched in sweat.”
Paget wasn’t the only one who was disturbed by the experience. Charles Darwin dropped out of medical school, at least partly because he didn’t have the stomach for pre-anesthesia surgery.
