← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
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- [00:00]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling, and if you would like After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access.
- [00:10]
Maddy Pelling
Sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week.
- [00:21]
Anthony Delaney
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
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- [00:55]
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- [01:58]
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- [02:35]
Maddy Pelling
Hello, and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.
- [02:38]
Anthony Delaney
And I'm Anthony.
- [02:39]
Maddy Pelling
And today we're taking you back to the messy, gory and dangerous world of Victorian surgery. This, be warned, is not one. If you are a little bit squeamish, folks, so do bear that in mind going forward. First of all, Anthony is going to set the scene for us.
- [02:58]
Anthony Delaney
It's 1840 in a graveyard on the edge of London, and not long past midnight, a gloomy mist settled between the crooked headstones of this hallowed burial site. Nearby, gas lamps are dim. The silence is heavy. But beneath the still surface, the ground is about to stir. Two figures slip through a broken gate. Coats slick with rain, boots muffled in the sodden earth. They carry no lantern, only the tools of their trade. Spades, a crowbar, rope with hooks, and a sack large enough to hold a man, or rather, what was once a man. They know their target. A fresh burial site, barely a day old. Therein lies the body of a young man, just 17, claimed by consumption. His family had no money for a watchman to stand guard over his remains that night. And no mortsafe cages, the freshly shoveled earth. In fact, all there was between this particular body and the living was a wooden box and a few feet of soil. With grim efficiency, they begin. One digs, the other listens. Time is of the essence. A shout, a dog, a passing patrol. Any of it could disrupt their nocturnal task. But there is a hunger behind, behind their haste. Not just greed, but a need to dig. London's hospitals are teeming. Surgeons are learning to amputate faster, to probe deeper, to dream of saving what once was lost. But to learn from the human body, they must possess it. Minutes pass. Wood cracks, A rope goes down. Up come the dead as the body is retrieved. Somewhere across the city, in the flickering light of a surgical theater, a scalpel is being sharpened. The future of medicine, it seems, is built on stolen flesh.
- [05:26]
Maddy Pelling
Well, that was quite the atmospheric opening. This is the murky and messy world of the Victorian surgical theatre. And it's a world that was supplied, as we heard in the opening, with the industry that was grave robbing. But before we go into the operating theatre, I want to introduce our guests. For today, it's Sarah Yorith from the old Operating Theatre Museum in London that before we were recording, Anthony and I saying we have not been and we're so desperate to go. Sarah, we are genuinely thrilled to have you on After Dark. Welcome.
- [05:57]
Sarah Yorith
Thank you so much for having me.
- [05:58]
Maddy Pelling
You're very welcome so give us an idea. First of all, were we to attend the surgical theatre of the 19th century, what we might expect to see what was going on in these spaces.
- [06:12]
Sarah Yorith
I'm going to take you back in time to 18:22. So this is the time and the year when our operating theater, that is now the Europe's oldest surviving surgical operating theater, is opened. You are walking into a room almost entirely made of wood. On the floor, you're going to find sawdust. The purpose of this is to catch the blood from the operations. You're going to have ahead of you. Stands that can fit up to 100 people watching the operation take place. They are going to be loud, they're going to be smoking, they're going to be talking, they're even going to be eating during surgery. Oysters were a big favourite. There's no hand washing, there's bloody aprons and the surgeon is coming in very much coated in the smog and the dirt of everyday Victorian London. It is pretty intense.
- [07:11]
Anthony Delaney
You could say, well, I don't want to do any more work today because now I just want to go to the old operating theatre. It's a crime that we haven't been Maddie. But this is just what drew me to the darker side of history for so long. And you just summed it up so brilliantly, Sarah. This idea of innovation and grime and the streets and intellectualism and surgery and bodies and it's all bits of life and death kind of crashing together in this very. And it's what makes these spaces, when I have seen them in other, you know, documentaries or whatever, it's what makes them so evocative. And you just did such an incredible job. When I do come, I'm gonna seek you out, Sarah, and you can show me around. And I know the firsthand account of this as I go there now, tell me this. We have the building, we have the atmosphere of the building that you just described. But talk to me about the wider context of surgical innovation and surgical practice in the Victorian. I mean, you've described something that's Lake Georgian in terms of your operating theater, but we then move into the kind Victorian era as well. So what are the innovations that are happening? What is the mindset around surgery? How does the everyday man and woman on the street see these things? And then how is the medical team that is behind all of these things? How are they looking at it? Is there a disparity there?
- [08:28]
Sarah Yorith
To be Honest, the whole 19th century is a changing developing environment. London, especially, like most cities, is becoming more and more industrial, which plays a huge part in how many people are going in for operations. When we go into the Victorian period, in the early years, we are still without both anesthesia and antiseptic. These things only start to come in in first the 1840s, then in the 1860s. So you're not going into surgery lightly. It is not going to be something that you're doing like we would now. You might want a surgery for cosmetic reasons or just for a better quality of life, which is completely valid at this point. It is a life and death situation that will put you on that table. And the amount of operations that can be done without anesthesia and antiseptic are very limited, not pleasant environments. And at this point, when you don't have these developments yet, what you have is speed on your side. So surgeons would be trying to do these operations as quickly as humanly possible. So if you've got a really great surgeon like Robert Liston, he can do a surgery, you can do an amputation in under three minutes, you're good, that's great, that's wonderful for you. If you have a surgeon who's fresh out of learning, never done one before, it could take up to an hour and you are wide awake, your body could go into shock, you could die of blood loss, but more often than not, you might leave the table alive. But post operative infection is the killer, really. And what's quite interesting compared to what we see as medicine now, when we're in trouble, when we're worried about our bodies, we would go to a hospital and that is where you would feel like you're going to get the best care. At this point in time, your chance of surviving surgery in a hospital is significantly less than if you have it in your own home. Unfortunately, unless you're extremely wealthy and well off, you can't afford this. So our operating theatre was connected to St. Thomas's Hospital. St. Thomas's was just for the working poor and the deserving poor. So their lives were not easy. They would be expected to go back into these very harsh jobs. After an amputation, for example, you're not going to have an easy ride. But what is really exciting in this period is that you do start to see these incredible, incredible developments in medicine. So if we fast forward a little bit to the 1840s, this is when anesthesia first comes in. So pain relief had been used up until this point, but the actual removal of sensation hadn't particularly. And so in the 1840s, for the UK, this is sort of the big Starting point. What's not great is that anesthesia does do what it needs to do. It helps put people out for surgery, which means suddenly for a surgeon, your patient is still for the first time ever, which is incredible. It's great. The downside is that dosage is not very well understood in this period. And so you're entering this time period where you are giving people this drug, but you're either potentially under dosing them, so they're suddenly waking up in the middle of surgery, which is not good. As someone with anxiety, that is absolutely terrifying for me. But also, you can overdose somebody on anesthesia, so you could survive the surgery itself, but die simply from there just being too much of this drug in your body. And that's the thing about medicine, is that within its history, we see these positive developments moving forward, but they take some time to be fully positive and to see that impact. And anesthesia really needed the help of antiseptics as well. Because with anesthesia, you've got a body, you've got a person who is nice and still, and it means a surgeon can take their time. That's great. Great surgeon. Not so great. When you are the patient who has a wound that is open for much longer than ever before, your chance of infection is so much higher in the first few years after anesthesia. So in the 1860s, we see carbolic acid being used and sprayed onto wounds. This is a huge development. The combination of the two is brilliant. But it always is really interesting that it takes time for it to be believed and to be widely used. So in the 1860s, we see a few people experimenting. It really is a time of growth and development. And there's lots of people working on different things all around the world. In Western medicine, it is very much Joseph Lister, who gets kind of the name of being sort of the savior when it comes to antiseptic. But he did get pushback. People were not eager to sort of initially believe in it. Same with anesthetics. It's always this big change, and that's really scary to accept that in some ways that this is the right way forward. So one of the big pushbacks for anesthesia was actually to do with it being used in childbirth. So there was a lot of belief that the pain of childbirth was actually to do with original sin and that it was there for a reason. It was something God intended. And so to remove that was the wrong way forward, which I don't think any person who has given birth now would particularly appreciate.
- [14:02]
Maddy Pelling
Sarah, you mentioned there the different skill levels of surgeons and that if you were having an amputation, you might get lucky and you might have someone who had done maybe 100, 200 of these before and would, you know, just perform the procedure in a couple of minutes, maybe three minutes. But you might get someone who is less well trained. Tell me, then, about where body snatching comes into this, because one thing that we know about medicine in this period is that there's a high demand for medical care and people are willing to learn. But there is a process to learning the skills of a surgeon, isn't there?
- [14:38]
Sarah Yorith
Body snatching, for me, is one of my favourite parts of this story, I think, because I specialise in history of medicine, but also grief. It's a really dark part of our history, but it's fascinating and informative all at once. So to fully understand body snatching, you kind of have to go back in time a little bit to 1752, and this date is really important because in comes the Murder Act. So at this point, medical schools aren't as established, but there is some need for dissection to learn about the human body. Previously, a lot of animal dissections had been relied upon, but human dissection naturally is so important, understanding how our bodies work. And so in 1752, they decided that they would pass this law to enable murderers, executed murderers, to almost get a posthumous punishment so that they would be executed and then given to the anatomy schools to be dissected. And this was the main source of cadavers for dissection until the 1830s. And what this does is there's two parts to this which are really important for us, understanding body snatching. The first is that the supply and demand do not meet. So increasingly, as we get into the 19th century, we start to notice that anatomy schools, there are more of them and they are in high demand because more and more people are learning via watching surgeries. This is so good for medicine, but we don't have the bodies to allow it, which in a sense is a good thing. It means there aren't that many people being executed for murder. In no way do we want to be encouraging people to go out and murder, but at the same time, medicine has that need. And so body snatchers very much see an opportunity to make a little bit of money.
- [16:32]
Anthony Delaney
This is kind of where that dysregulation or lack of regulation really comes in. Right, Sarah? And it allows this trade, I suppose, to flourish, as you're saying, in the late part of the 18th century and then into the early part of the 19th century, but you already hinted at it there. And I think it might be important to do a bit of a contrast between that time period and then what happens after the anatomy act in 1832. And this is not directly but indirectly influenced by some of the Burke and Hare murders that we have seen and we've spoken about in this podcast before in Scotland. And I'm just wondering what you can tell us, because this is the time period we're going to be entering into in this conversation is the post Anatomy act time. So tell us what the difference between that and what had gone before is. So what does the Anatomy act actually change?
- [17:25]
Sarah Yorith
Body snatching is not something anybody. Once it's happening, there's public outcry about it. And so the Anatomy act comes in and the purpose of it is an attempt to make bodies more readily available for dissection. What's really important to recognize, though, is that up until this period, dissection was so publicly connected to crime and punishment. So the Anatomy act brings in a rule that suddenly any person who dies in places like workhouses, prisons, hospitals and are unclaimed for about 48 hours can then be given to the anatomy school survey sacrifice. But what's really key about this is most of those people are going to be the poor. And suddenly, especially in public conversation, it feels very much like what this is saying is that being poor is almost like you're a criminal, because that is the story. That is how everyone saw dissection up until this point. So there was a lot of public disagreement with the Anatomy act, but what it did do is definitely made bodies more readily available for the anatomy schools to use.
- [18:34]
Maddy Pelling
I find it fascinating, Sarah, the move to using a broader section of society as a source for corpses and yes, this on the one hand, move away from criminality, but also a blurring of those boundaries and actually, I suppose, an augmentation of this idea, criminality to include the poor. I wonder how people perceive the space of the surgical theatre then. I'm thinking about, I suppose, the sort of spectacle and drama of the late 18th century theatre. That's the surgical theatre. Of course, in terms of, as you mentioned earlier, dissection is a form of posthumous punishment. It's a way of exacting further revenge, further justice, I suppose, on the body of murderers specifically. And it's a form of human humiliation that's performed in front of the public. And then in the 19th century, we start to get more regulation around the bodies that are being used, but also more regulation around the surgical space itself. Right. In terms of the quality of training, in terms of the use of different medicines, different apparatus, things are becoming more technical, more advanced, more specific. Is there a world in which the theatre itself separates off from that spectacle? Or are we still seeing that in the Victorian period, that kind of the criminal body at the heart of proceedings?
- [20:02]
Sarah Yorith
With professionalisation, Daphne creates that movement because medicine does become its own kind of world where, unlike previously, you have to pass certain exams or expectations to be able to get in. There was always a bit of a separation with surgery and dissection, so surgery was always a lot more contained and not so much for public consumption. And I think, yes, the fact that it was murder has played a big part. But through the Victorian era, we now start to see that begin to separate and that what is good, though, is that with more surgery happening, there's actually two opportunities for students to learn. They're not just having to rely on the dead, they can also learn from surgeries of the living. And so those spaces do become less public because it's hard to imagine now we're having surgery and having a whole audience of people who can just buy a ticket and just watch you in immense pain for however long. But, yeah, it's a slow process and it also really differs across region and area and country, even.
- [21:09]
Anthony Delaney
Sarah, can I ask, you know, we're viewing this as a kind of a trade and we're looking at some of the different links in the trade and I just want to draw some of those links together little bit more. So we have the pre Anatomy act time period and we have the practices that are happening then, and then we have the post Anatomy act time period, we have body snatchers that are feeding bodies to the surgeons, either through middle men or directly themselves. They may have certain relationships. So my first question on linking those two things is, do we have a need or documentation of body snatchers still operating after the Anatomy act, despite the fact that there are more bodies available? Is this still something that's happening? Are they still in cahoots with the surgeons after that?
- [21:55]
Sarah Yorith
Yes, definitely. It takes time for it to fully get on board. And there's also a lot of amendments and, you know, there's a lot of pushback and it changes and it develops and then, to be honest, body snatchers are still being recorded right through the Victorian era because there is still that need. There's also really dependent on area. So places like London, they adjust. The pure amount of anatomy schools and students means that the need for bodies is still really, really high. But the Anatomy act does massively reduce it over time. And by the time Queen Victoria passes away and we exit the Victorian era, it is pretty much gone.
- [22:36]
Anthony Delaney
Okay, so my follow up question to that then is we. Have I mentioned Burke and Hare already? Right. I want to get a bit of a picture of. We know there was like the London Burkers, so they were inspired by, well, they say were inspired by the murders of Burke and Hare. What exactly is the body snatching scene looking like in London specifically at this time?
- [22:59]
Sarah Yorith
So very much like Edinburgh, London is this hub of medical knowledge and discovery and also has plenty of graveyards. So the body snatchers are very much in this sort of network of knowing people inland, the hospitals, getting tip offs from certain undertakers about freshly buried bodies. And they are very much sneaking in at night under the COVID of darkness. And what's really interesting actually is that at this point stealing a body isn't illegal. The body itself, because it isn't owned by anyone. It's the stealing itself isn't, because you're not stealing it from somebody. But you had to be really, really careful to ensure that there was no clothing on the body or that you weren't taking anything from the coffin because all of those things would be considered theft. So it's a really interesting period where until the anatomy act comes in, there really aren't rules protecting it. And so it really comes down to, as you mentioned at the beginning, watchmen who are watching graveyards and also families themselves. They would even instill cages if you could afford it, over the burial site to ensure nobody could dig through. And you can still see those in graveyards around London, which is incredible. If you've ever done a walking tour of London, I highly recommend something on body snatching because there are so many symbols of it still today in our graveyards and in our history.
- [24:47]
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- [25:47]
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- [26:53]
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- [27:15]
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- [27:35]
Maddy Pelling
Something that always fascinates me, Sarah, about this history. And it's something that Anthony and I have looked at before when we've covered covered work and hair is on the one hand this underworld of criminality and as you mentioned, these networks of the trade in human flesh. But then at the opposite end of the spectrum, we have these very learned men who are performing just how well educated and elite they are in this surgical space. Again and again and in true after dark tradition I'm now going to make Anthony describe a painting which is, by the looks of things, maybe an early or mid 19th century scene of surgery. And Anthony, I want you to particularly focus on just what a gendered space this is here. This is the absolute performance of masculine learning, isn't it?
- [28:22]
Anthony Delaney
Well, this is who Sarah has referred to before, apparently. Robert Liston, performing the first surgical operation in England with ether as an anesthetic. And we're dating this to 1846. It is a rather polite affair in many ways. And there's two men at the centre of the just off center of the painting and they are quite finely dressed. Waistcoats are tightly fastened. They're wearing very smart trousers and shoes, but the sleeves are rolled up and they're wearing aprons which look, for all intents and purposes, like kind of butcher's aprons today or whatever you might think of those trendy cafes or coffee shops. It looks very much like that. So it's very polite, it's very clean. There is not a speck of blood in this image. And there is a younger man, it seems to me, who looks like he's holding a leg in place that's about to potentially come off. And then there's a few items of surgery that would be associated with Victorian surgery. To the right of the picture, on its side table, some bowls maybe for collecting blood or collecting organs or whatever it might be that's coming out of the body. Then we have to the left hand side of the image and actually all around we have lots of men looking in onto and around this scene. So there, there are men, lots of bald heads. Actually, I'm noticing staring down at this image, the knife that Liston is holding is held aloft for everybody to see. And people are really taking notice of this. But it's also interesting how they are behaving in the audience because they're standing up, they're looking over, they're sitting down, they look quite relaxed, they look quite chilled. It looks like an everyday occurrence to these people. And they are really smartly dressed. I would say that all of them, more or less, they all look to me like 50 plus or at least the main characters that I'm seeing. So this is a distinguished audience that we have. Everything looks pristine. It's quite an aspirational image. Which actually, Sarah, to bring it back to what you were talking about earlier, does this lie a little bit, do you think, in terms of that pain threshold, the kind of messiness of this? Or is this a realistic depiction of.
- [30:31]
Sarah Yorith
What was going on 50, 50, I'd say. I think definitely this painting is before the surgery has officially started. So there's no cuts yet. Fast forward five minutes. It's probably going to be a slightly different scene, but, yeah, a lot of it is a lot more gory than that. So in terms of the cleanliness at this point, they don't so much understand germ theory before the 1860s, but they do clean anything that looks dirty. So, for example, in the operating theatre, you would have a wash basin. You wouldn't wash your hands necessarily before the surgery, but you would afterwards because you would have the blood on your hands. So there was cleaning involved. The hospital cleaners, I cannot imagine the job they must have done that must have been harrowing. I know the painting you're talking about, I think, and what I do think is really good about that is that the stands where you see mostly the kind of key characters are going to be those older surgeons. And there was definitely a pecking order in operating theaters. So at the front, there would be the more distinguished, you know, other surgeons who are there. And especially if Robert Liston's in the building, you know, they want to be watching because he is renowned for his abilities in surgery. And they are going to be right at the front. That is like the space of honor. And behind them is then going to be the younger students who are going to be pushing each other to try and get a viewpoint of the surgery, because that's how they learn. But these kind of images are really evocative of what a surgery would look like. They're never going to feature every little detail. And, yeah, this one is definitely before the surgery starts, but thankfully it is over generally pretty quickly, Especially if it's Robert with the knife. He is going to be quick, he's going to be swift. But, yeah, in terms of their dress as well, it kind of hits nail on the head that there wasn't, you know, that now we know doctors as wearing scrubs and gloves and everything, but they would come in their sort of day clothes, they'd be walking around London, and then in they come, put on a doctor's coat and an apron and that's it. There really isn't that separation of clothing and that uniform look of what a doctor is.
- [32:42]
Maddy Pelling
Now, it strikes me, Sarah, that there's, as you say, kind of pecking order here. This is the space of male sociability, really. This is, yeah, performance of authority, of sort of social connection. As you say, you've got kind of the most prestigious surgeons at the front where everyone can see them. Right. They're part of the performance. They're almost on the stage, as it were. Talk to me about celebrity surgeons. We've spoken here about Robert Liston, and am I right in thinking that he's known as the fastest knife in the West End, but he's not always particularly accurate with that knife, is he?
- [33:17]
Sarah Yorith
I'm guessing you're referring to his 300% knife mortality rate surgery. Yes. Robert Liston is genuinely renowned as being incredible. There is a story that goes that he had a surgery that had a 300% mortality rate. There's question marks around whether this was true. The likelihood is probably it wasn't, but it is a really interesting story and I think it tells you a lot about him. So the story roughly goes that in a surgery, he was so swift with his knife that I think he chopped off some fingers of one of the dressers and then he also catches one of the audience members and then he goes into shock and they later die of gangrene as well as the patient.
- [34:02]
Maddy Pelling
It's something like that, isn't it, that he manages to kill the patient on the table, one of his assistants, I think. Yeah. And someone in the audience, all with the flourish of just one knife and sort of almost like one movement, I believe, as well. Once when he was amputating a leg, he accidentally took someone's testicle off as well.
- [34:18]
Sarah Yorith
Yeah.
- [34:18]
Maddy Pelling
That's not what you want from a surgeon, is it?
- [34:21]
Sarah Yorith
No, definitely not. Again, it's one of those ones that he's so renowned as this celebrity surgeon. There are a lot of these stories that come out and it's always really hard to know where the line between it being this piece of gossip and it actually happening comes from. Generally, I like to sort of assume some sort of middle ground where something happened, but it probably wasn't as extreme as the 300% mortality rate or maybe the full testicle. It could have been a little prod, maybe a little stab, but he was.
- [34:52]
Maddy Pelling
I think anything is unacceptable, really.
- [34:55]
Sarah Yorith
Most definitely. I think the patient would probably agree with you, but. Yeah, but Robert Liston, I think these stories, whether they're true or not, really do give this image into his world of constantly trying to improve and be the best speed was his go to. He definitely was referred to quite often as the fastest knife in the West End, and he did make huge advancements in surgery. He really changed some of the shapes of the knives and how different procedures were done. But, yeah, I definitely think there's an argument to be made that he was very keen to be known and to be considered one of the best, whether his actions were always maybe the best decision.
- [35:39]
Anthony Delaney
You're building up a really good picture, Sarah, of what's happening inside these theatres and who is in there. But just one thing that I want to clarify is, and this might be a bit of a generalization, but I think it's probably worth looking into a little bit. Who are the types of men specifically I'm talking about in this period that are becoming surgeons? Like, what type of a person is this attracting? Because it sounds quite brutal, it doesn't sound particularly gentlemanly. And yet in those images, that is a depiction of a lot of Victorian gentlemanliness. So talk to me about the kind of status of a surgeon in this society.
- [36:16]
Sarah Yorith
Again, for this story, you kind of have to have a little bit of that, like, pre Victorian basis to really see how it develops. So in sort of into the early years of the 19th century, there's very much a separation between physicians and surgeons. So physicians were very much these gentlemanly figures. They were very rich and they were very hands off with medicine. They were very happy in their books. Fully appreciate, I'm a historian, I get it. But they weren't as involved, it wasn't as hands on as the surgeon. And so the actual surgical side of things was actually a lot less of that sort of doctor position, which is traditionally why they refer to as Mr. Rather than doctor. They would have been trained via apprenticeship. And that comes out of that history of barber surgeons, being that because it is a grisly part of medicine where physicians didn't really like to get involved with whatever was going on on the patient, they would be doing a lot more prescribing and diagnosing at this point. Surgery is very much not that gentlemanly and is considered quite separate. But from about 1815, as we get into the 19th century, further and closer to the Victorian period, this professionalization starts where there's this movement of more regulated education for surgeons. And so it does change that image of what a surgeon is. So they do become more gentlemanly. Unfortunately, it also means that there's a certain level of nepotism involved. So you'll often find people like Ashley Cooper, who was a very, very famous surgeon, his nephew suddenly became a surgeon, and not a particularly good one from all accounts. And so all of a sudden you're like, you're kind of questioning how these people have got to the position that they have. But thankfully, as the Victorian period kind of rolls around and goes further on we start to see the need for actual training and getting certification. And the Royal College of Surgeons plays a really big part in this, in trying to ensure that there's actually some level of skill required to handle the knife, which is really key. But yeah, it's definitely not going to be a particularly easy to get into industry for anyone who is working class. You know, it doesn't necessarily get good pay right from the off, so you need a bit of that financial support. So overwhelmingly you are going to find that more upper class, gentlemanly backing Forbes surgeons.
- [39:04]
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- [40:24]
Maddy Pelling
Sarah, talk to me about the medical procedures themselves on the table. We've mentioned amputation and an accidental removal of a testicle, but what procedures were being carried out and just how gory were they?
- [40:41]
Sarah Yorith
So before we get into anesthesia and antiseptic and even in the early days of them, so through most of the Victorian period, you're going to experience three main surgeries, which is the ones we kind of talk about the most at the museum. The first one is amputation. It's the easiest to show. We do a great demonstration of Victorian amputation and that is quite straightforward. What people don't sometimes realize is with amputation, it can also include things like external tumors being sliced off. So like mastectomies were being done and they were in a way straightforward. The survival rate is not the best necessarily, but it can be done very quickly. And the main thing about surgery at this point is it's very external. You don't want to be going too deep into the body. So amputation is always a big one. Then we have lithotomy, the removal of bladder stones. This is the one that whenever I talk about to the public especially, men tend to get a little bit, like, freaked out by it. Because the way to remove a bladder stone is you take a metal rod called lithotomy probe, and you insert it via the urethra up into the. Yeah, that expression is exactly. And to do exactly what. What most people look like for the.
- [41:57]
Maddy Pelling
Benefit of the listeners. Anthony's eyes have peeled back in his head.
- [42:02]
Sarah Yorith
Yeah. Which is fair. And then an incision would probably be made to try and remove it. But bladder stones can be massive, and they are these really, like, hard, halcyous forms that can build over time. Not pleasant. It's probably one of the deeper surgeries you'll get. And then the other one is actually. I mean, like many of these, they are centuries old, and it's trepanation. And this one is the one that kind of gets me a bit gross. And it's because it literally bores a hole quite often into the skull. And often that's to do with head injuries. If you've got swelling, if you've fractured your skull and you've got bits of bone that you need to remove. But anything near my brain just. No, I hate it. But these. All three of these surgeries have been prevalent for centuries before the Victorian period. For as long as humans have existed, we have injured ourselves. We have probably done parkour and jumped off things we shouldn't have. And so you need someone there to fix it. What changes is who does it and the tools that we use.
- [43:05]
Anthony Delaney
Do you know what I have never spent touching all of the wood? I have never spent a single night in hospital. And now I know it's only because I have never done parkour. So that is why I have so far resisted that. Stay. Tell me this before we start to move towards kind of. Of wrapping up the conversation, I want to know, when, in your opinion, do we start to see something that's a little bit more identifiably modern? Because I'm assuming, and maybe I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that's also a Victorian, maybe very late Victorian advancement, where we would see this element of sterilization coming in, where we would see something where, if we were plonked in that setting now, it would feel a little bit more familiar than, you know, the sawdust that you described at the beginning. When does that transition happen, happen in.
- [43:49]
Sarah Yorith
The 1860s is the starting point. So the minute we start more widespread talking about gems theory, that is the catalyst of starting to understand gems. It takes time. It's not a clear sort of pattern. It very much differs regionally. But into the sort of very, very last few years and last decade of the 19th century and into the first bit of the 20th century. That is where we start to see more mainstream use of, well, less wood. Wood, which is lovely. Even the surgical tools had wooden handles, which were just not a good idea. But also the table became metal, which were all just easier to clean, easier to sterilise. And it takes time. It always takes time. You're always going to have pushback of any new discoveries. But by the time we are into the 20th century, it is a very different picture and for the better. There's definitely still places to go. And not long later we see the start of World War I, where suddenly you are, never mind the operating theatre. All of that has to be done in a bloodbath and on a battlefield that's really intense. But we do see those improvements and we do see that step away from wooden operating theatres, which I can only be grateful for as someone who spends every day there.
- [45:05]
Maddy Pelling
Well, Sarah, to wrap up then, let's have a think about the fact that you do spend every day there, because we've just spent almost an hour in this gruesome, grimy, candlelit world and thinking about how risky it was, how dangerous it was. But this is a space that still survives, that you spend your working life in, and a historic space that you spend your working life thinking about. So what's it like to work on these histories? And why should people come to the museum?
- [45:36]
Sarah Yorith
For risk of being very cliche, it is an absolute honour to talk about stories of what is. It's also, it was a women's operating theatre, so it's women's stories. And women's health is such a complex and often overlooked area of history, but it is incredible and it is also very harrowing. Sometimes I don't believe in it being haunted. It's a question I get a lot, but I do feel like it has a feeling to it and that you can feel that history and it really does feel like going back in time. So it's incredible. And I do really encourage everybody who can to come and visit us. It is at the top of a 52 step spiral staircase, but it is so worth it. We are an independent charity, so any support we absolutely love. And it means that we can keep this amazing space open for hopefully hundreds of years to come.
- [46:28]
Anthony Delaney
Love it. I'm definitely going and you'll be seeing me in the next week or two. That is a promise. I'm coming in. Well, listen, Sarah, thank you so much. It is one of those, I don't know Mattie. Like we've seen it and we've talked about million times and as I say, I pass by going to London Bridge almost every day, if not several times a week anyway and it's just one of those places I keep mentally tagging to go. You need to go there, you need to go there, you need to go there. Like it's right up our street. I don't know what's taking us so long to do it, but now we are going to do it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. You can go back and listen to some of our other episodes that deal with the Victorian time period. We have Victorian death photography there. Or if we want to go further AFIELD in the 19th century, we have have the Paris Morgue. Of course. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. And until next time, get planning your visit to the old operating theatre at London Bridge.
- [47:27]
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- [48:00]
Anthony Delaney
Too many to say here. Multi vehicle discount Safe driver discount New vehicle discount Storage discount.
- [48:06]
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