Operating with bare hands, dressed in his street clothes, he had taken those first steps that every training surgeon must take-gripping the handle of a scalpel and making the first, irrevocable cut into live human flesh.
For the surgeon training in the early 1840s, these first surgical milestones were performed on a person who would recoil in terror and horror, flinch, pull away, shake-and scream and scream and scream. Until 1846, surgery was performed without anaesthesia: extraordinary operations, carried out on conscious, terrified patients. Surgeons of that...
Operating with bare hands, dressed in his street clothes, he had taken those first steps that every training surgeon must take-gripping the hand...
