It took a lot of guts to undergo surgery in the days before anesthetics and antibiotics, when the pain was intense and the survival rate was abysmal. The decision pretty much had to be a matter of life and death. It’s difficult to imagine how horrific surgery was for the patient, but we can get some idea from a professional writer who lived through a mastectomy. English novelist Fanny Burney put off surgery for breast cancer as long as she could, but in September of 1811 allowed herself to be put under the knife- while wide awake in her living room. She later wrote about the experience.
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
“I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision—and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! so excruciating was the agony. When the wound was made, and the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp and forked poniards, that were tearing the edges of the wound—but when again I felt the instrument—describing a curve—cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left—then, indeed, I thought I must have expired.”
There’s more. Read the story of Burney’s operation at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company
Source: neatorama