Medicine The oldest surviving operating room in Europe is in the attic of the church in London – women have been cut there since 1822, without anesthesia and with a surgeon

London

In April 1824 Londoner in his sixties Elizabeth Raigen fell under the big horse carts. His tibia and fibula were broken.

Raigen was taken to a hospital where bones were tried to get together. Did not work out.

“The wound is getting more and more wet and the smell is very bad. The foot is blackened, suggesting necrosis. Medication with port wine and stimulants will continue, ”the authoritative medical magazine The Lancet reported on the case recently.

The only way to save the patient’s life was by amputation.

Raigen agreed to remove the leg. The saw was grabbed by a surgeon Benjamin Travers.

Raigenilla had been lucky enough to have an accident – at least until the day of the surgery.

St. Thomas’ Hospital in London had opened an operating room for female patients only a couple of years earlier in 1822. Until then, the hospital had only operated on men.

The men’s operating room was opened as early as the 1750s.

“It wasn’t so much because women weren’t cared for. The reason was that the illnesses and accidents that could be operated on at the time mainly affected men, ”says the historian, Dr. Monica Walker.

19th century in the first half of the year, only three types of major surgical procedures were performed at a London hospital: amputations, ie removal of limbs, removal of urinary stones, and skull drilling.

Urinary stones were mostly a men’s affliction. The accidents that led to the amputation also threatened men working in dangerous positions – ports, factories, mines and the military.

Of course, women were also involved in accidents at work and injured, for example, as victims of domestic violence. However, the injuries were often internal. As factories began to employ massive numbers of women and children, the situation changed.

St. Thomasin that is, the women’s operating room at St. Thomas Hospital will celebrate its 200th anniversary this year. It is believed to be the oldest surviving operating room in Europe.

The operating room was once established in the attic of St. Thomas’ Church, next to the herbal attic. The operating room lasted for forty years until 1862. That’s when the hospital moved.

The operating room was placed in the attic because it had the best daylight. Women were usually cut only once a week: on Fridays from noon for as long as there was enough light.

The herb attic had been drying and storing medicinal plants for the hospital since the early 18th century. Between the floorboards, ancient parts of the opium poppy have been found later.

The women’s first operating room was forgotten for a hundred years. The hall was rediscovered in the 1950s, when it was restored. Now it has operated as a museum for sixty years (The Old Operating Theater Museum & Herb Garret).

Surgical the work was not as prestigious in the early days as it is today. In London, surgeons were still part of the guild system with other knife users in the 18th century.

“The surgeons weren’t doctors, and they weren’t considered gentlemen because they did the work with their hands,” says Walker, the museum’s public relations manager.

Only the doctors who studied at the university were real doctors and gentleman.

“Again, they didn’t touch the patients with their hands because they were gentlemen.”

Walker according to early 19th-century hospital stories are almost always horror stories in the ears of the modern listener. Only those people who were already in the tongues of death dared to be cut.

Antiseptics were not known, so the operating room and tools could not be cleaned. Surgeons were more likely to wash their hands after surgery than before.

“The bloodier the apron, the more experienced and better the surgery was considered.”

Bandages were recycled from patient to patient. The blood was allowed to soak into the sawdust on the floor.

Patients’ chances of survival improved significantly after an English doctor Joseph Lister introduced carbolic acid, or phenol, in the cleaning of tools. This did not happen until 1864.

Pioneer in destroying harmful bacteria and developing vaccines was Lister, a French chemist Louis Pasteur.

Unknown There was also anesthesia in the early 19th century.

Surgery patients were given a better lack of booze or opium. Some surgeons tried to freeze the limb being amputated.

Ether anesthesia was first used in a London hospital around 1846. Chloroform came in handy.

However, patient deaths did not decrease with anesthesia. On the contrary.

“At first, the surgeons became too confident. Surgery was prolonged when surgeons were allowed to operate on their patients in peace. At the same time, too many bacteria got into the surgical wound, ”Walker says.

It was also sometimes the case that the anesthetic was overdosed and the patient died. Sometimes again, too little was given and the patient woke up in the middle of surgery.

Before the invention of anesthesia to keep the operating room patient in place required up to dozens of assistants. The surgeon had to work quickly and saw with his shoulder.

About a third of operating room patients died at St. Thomas Hospital.

“The sooner the surgery was over, the better the chances of surviving.”

The ideal size of the operation was less than two minutes.

The Scottish surgeon in London was particularly quick Robert Liston. He was later christened “the fastest knife user” in the West End of London. The price of speed was inaccurate: Liston sometimes cut what it shouldn’t have.

London the famous St. Thomas Hospital was originally founded as early as the 12th century, when it was part of an Augustinian monastery.

The hospital, south of the river Thames, has changed its location and condition several times. The poor were cared for – at least in principle – for free. In the 1750s, however, it was stipulated that the same illness could be treated only once.

Some never left the hospital.

The teaching of surgery had begun in the 1810s, but there was a shortage of training facilities in hospitals. The robbers dug up the newly buried at night and sold the bodies on.

To improve the situation in Britain, an “anatomy law” was enacted in the 1830s. It ruled that if the body of a deceased person in the hospital is not to be recovered within two days, the body will remain for educational use.

In 1836, 1,332 people were killed in the hospital. Of these, the bodies of 134 remained for use in research and teaching.

In St. Thomas nursing education also began. A pioneer in the field Florence Nightingale founded his nursing school there in 1859.

Anyway, the history of medicine has been done many times in the hospital. And when the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson the condition worsened after he contracted coronary heart disease in April 2020, he was rushed to the intensive care unit of St. Thomas Hospital.

St. Thomas is now part of the UK public health system, the NHS. Its services are free of charge for permanent residents.

How visited Elizabeth Raigen on the operating table in the spring of 1824?

Known for his clumsiness, Travers served as Raigen’s surgeon, but dozens of assistants roared next door. The amputation could be followed by smokehouses and noises from up to 150 male medical students.

The patient’s head was held with an elevated wooden patch.

“The surgeon could only assess the patient’s face in which direction his condition was progressing.”

Raigenin the leg has been reported to last about 20 minutes. The patient remained conscious and survived.

After the operation, the patient was served brandy and wine, which improved his condition.

Joy however, it was premature. The surgical wound became inflamed, and Raigen died just days after the operation.

“Why surgery had to be postponed [päivällä] to Friday, ”The Lancet later criticized the surgeon’s work.