Victorian Era Surgery

When you think of surgery, most of us get an image of being rolled into an operation room filled with surgeons and technicians. You are given anesthesia either by liquid injected into your veins or by gas that is administered through a mask placed over your mouth and nose. After the surgery is performed you wake up and after a few hours, you are allowed to go home. However, in the Victorian era surgery was different. Back then, it was not the same type of anesthesia. You were not wheeled into rooms with all kinds of machinery. In the Victorian era, surgeons were trained differently, the relationship between surgeons and physicians was not the same, surgery was practiced by different people, they were performed in different places, there were

They provided the obvious service of performing surgeries which sometimes consisted of cutting the chest open, but they also reset broken bones and did pretty much everything physicians would or could not do (Joshi Doctors). However, at the beginning of the Victorian era, surgeons often did not perform surgery on important areas, such as the abdomen. A British surgeon, by the name of Sir John Erichsen, still believed that the abdomen, chest, and brain were inoperable in 1874 (Porter 230). This was because these areas were fairly essential to life and surgery was not the safest. With their technology or lack thereof, any operation done on a brain, chest, or abdomen was believed to be too risky. He actually believed that those would never be able to be operated upon, even though the abdomen began to be operated on no later than 8 years later. After 1850, surgeons no longer had to exclusively perform minor services such as lancing boils, but there could be more serious services, for example, Caesarian section (Porter 202). There were other surgeries such as appendectomies, or removal of the appendix, as well as cholecystectomies, or removal of the gallbladder, and surgeries on the small intestine that were all inaugurated during the Victorian era, mainly around 1882 (Porter 232). Still, with these advances, the more serious services had to be kept

In those 64 years, surgeons made many discoveries that caused important advancements in the world of surgery. There were new ways of dealing with infection that also improved public health (Porter 110). These consisted of washing wounds with vinegar, wine, freshly voided urine, or boiled water, then cleaning the wound of foreign objects, then covered in a simple bandage meant it would heal without trouble (Magner 295). These ideas were discovered by Joseph Lister around 1865. Lister was the first to challenge the idea that infection of a wound was inevitable. He found that if a wound was covered in a clean lint dressing and soaked in linseed oil and carbolic then it would not get infected (Porter 231). This discovery was called antisepsis. However, his ideas were not widely accepted. In fact, many surgeons did not like the smell of carbolic, and other’s problems with this were the reason his teachings were not accepted by the American Surgical Association (Porter 231). Another example of the improvement of public health was handwashing. In earlier practices, surgeons did not wash their hands because it was not proven effective until after 1867, and would go from the morgue to laboring women which caused the infant and female mortality rates to increase (Williams). However, Lister also found handwashing helps prevent infection at the same time he discovered the wound dressing (Porter 231). So, during the Victorian era, hand