For most of human history surgery was performed without anesthesia

you'll still feel it. People who are asleep can still feel pain

Did you see the episode in Rome where Titan Pluto got into a bar brawl with Caesar’s man and had to get an surgery
Well that’s kinda of what you can expect

>mfw I'm a dental student and I think about people who had teeth extracted without anesthetics

>In the autumn of 1685, Louis developed an agonising and persistent toothache, and his doctors decided to extract the offending molar. However, they were ignorant of the importance of post-operative hygiene, and infection set in: the king’s gums, jawbone and sinuses became dangerously inflamed. A committee of nervous physicians concluded that drastic measures were called for. Louis underwent a truly terrible ordeal: they removed all the teeth from the top layer of his mouth, then punctured his palate and broke his jaw. This was all completed without anaesthetic, the king being fully awake throughout this procedure. The most powerful man in Western Europe was helpless before the primitive medical knowledge of his time. At least the wounds were kept clean on this occasion – cauterised with red-hot coals.

Ancient people had a much higher pain threshold than modern people.

I had teeth extracted without anesthetics.

Fuck nigga I'll settle for the toothache

Thank you professor bro-science.

The whole 'no anesthesia' thing is kind of a meme. Doctors knew how to get people to fucking pass out, and there were plenty of anesthetic medicinal plant concoctions floating around. The issue comes from the fact that a lot of these weren't considered 'anesthetics' (yeah snort some poppy tincture its not opium or anything) and medical treatment was so poorly formalized for most of history that considerable pain or discomfort would be caused anyways.

The thing that really fucked you in ancient medicine was infection. Doctors knew what to do about things like toothaches, sinuses and other minor illnesses, and generally knew what needed to be done to fix serious fuckups like broken arms, but if you got an infection you were screwed.

Our ancestors were Wolves. We are their inbred puppies.

Dude weak men lmao

how bad was it?

General anaesthetic recipes involving Opium and Mandrake are recorded in medical texts from at least the 13th century.

This. Also, alcohol

only shit tier doctor in western "civilization" during middle age were this stupid.

doctors and surgoens had different defined roles, it was surgeons who dealt with the breaks, limb cuts and surgeries. Doctors prescribed medicine and gave advice and it was like this up until the 19thC i think. They trained differently, had different guilds and its the reason a surgeon is called Mr not Doctor at least in the UK, in modern times.

>cauterised with red-hot coals

this is like frosting on top

Weird question. I think the writings of Socrates, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotele, Plutarch etc answers this question intrinsically. As far as their resistance to pain goes. It is almost an unanswerable question if it was higher, lower or equal. Regardless of the unpractical medical procedures, if your life depended on it, you wouldn't have much other options.

Is that the worst thing you can think off? I had teeth fall off when I was a child and it hurt but it was nothing like when I broke my clavicle when I was 12.

ADDICTION IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT!

No, they just weren't pussies.

I had one of my wisdom teeth extracted without anesthetics, because my gums were too inflamed. Never been in so much pain in my life. I vividly remember crying and laughing desperately because of the pain while it happened.

Peter, please log out from twitter.

and do what?

anesthesia doesn't make you not feel the pain it just makes you forget it

t. we don't just get rid of the thing that hurts to get it to stop hurting anymore

but they said most of human history..we're in the 21st right now

like in modern correctional facilities

There's a massive difference between your teeth falling out and your teeth being extracted.

How so? When I was a child and one of my milk tooth was barely hanging one of my parents would get a thread and tug it out. I bled and it did hurt.

What's the difference to a "tooth extraction"?

getcha popcorn ready.

The problem is that your blood won't clot and you'll bleed out with more than a jigger or two of rum. Thank God for ether.

Umm... have you ever heard of local anesthesia? It doesn't mean that it got delivered from a mom n' pop shop in town.

local anesthesia isn't supposed to cause necrosis

Baby teeth are supposed to come out. When baby teeth are loose, pulling them out might hurt, sure, and there will be soreness. But it's not comparable to the experience of someone taking (by our standards) rather crude surgical tools and digging into someone's mouth to grip a tooth and pull and twist and pull and twist (crunch crunch CRUNCH) until the tooth comes out. Sometimes with some gum ripped out along with it.

I'm terrified at the dentist and the only thing that calms me down is thinking about how much more it would suck if I was getting dental work in an earlier time period.

It wasn't uncommon for people to make sculptures or paintings depicting tooth pain as literally hell incarnate, pic related.

please stay in school

?

Sorry that you getting a baby tooth pulled with a sting is a totally different experience than someone in the 1700s getting a tooth ripped out with some forceps.

at least tough it out to the part when they teach you to ask the patient to rate their pain on a scale from 1-10

this, a lot of those medical treatises and mid-wife guides include solutions involving herbs and other plant based drugs and shit for knocking people out
irrc in the middle ages doctors were college educated while barbers and surgeons (who did the real gruesome and dirty work) were not

why is everyone hunched

might be doctors n shit but they still gotta eat

Are you high or just retarded? I'm not the dental student. Again, sorry that you don't realize there's a difference between "mommy tied a string to my baby tooth and it wasn't that bad" and "people having dental surgery without any sort of anesthesia or proper numbing agents'

you aren't ?

Wasn't visiting a doctor or surgeon more likely to get you killed than noy just staying home throughout most of history?

If you have a family that you could somehow support even after your surgery, then death isn't an option

a good doctor or surgeon was more often than not worth it's weight in gold
the problem is that there was literally zero quality control so any hack with a saw could start up his own medical practice and keep going on until they were chased out of town

Yes but this is somewhat misleading since there were some excellent doctors, but because the profession was unregulated there were a lot more frauds and inept idiots.

this even mystics who knew one or two things about actual medicine and healing were very very valuable.

also, this is what libertarians want to go back to

People have had heroin for years

Also didn't help that a lot of cultures had a taboo regarding anatomical studies, so even if doctors made discoveries they often could not afford to write them down for future generations.
You'll see that in the western world, after anatomical studies become more commonplace the quality of the average practitioner goes up dramatically

No.

Yeah but then you would have the schooled doctor reminding you to take your daily dose of arsenic and practice bloodletting every odd thursday
Thank god for emperical based medicine

Surgeons were often bad and there were (and still are) many medical practices in use that basically just risked patients' health and lives without offering any verifyable benefit. But even then, running the risk of making things worse or dying by seeing a doctor/surgeon was still generally better than not getting your illnesses or injuries treated at all.
After all, if pre-modern medicine and surgery really did more harm than good, then it wouldn't have developed and continued to exist in almost every culture.

fun fact: bloodletting is in several cases the proper medical treatment for a given number of ailments

indeed, such as too much blood.

further reading? I know doctor was more of a learned degree, and a barber-surgeon was seen as a trade, but would like to know more.

Also just learned about the point where that changed was the King Louis XIV getting the first known successful surgery on his anal fistula.
>polyrad.info/louis-xiv-caused-anal-fistulas-to-become-a-hot-fashion-trend-among-the-aristocracy/
(Also had to look up what an anal fistula was, and in layman's terms, it's when another shithole or network thereof gets burrowed through your ass)

also don't we have skeletal records of successful cranial surgery dating back several thousand years?

backbones hadn't been invented yet.

An extremely limited set of ailments. George fucking Washington in his dying days with throat infection in 1799 was drained of 3 liters of blood (avg adult has 6 liters). This was in 1799 and brsinlet doctors thought bleeding was still a good thing. Civil War doctors also did similar. Medicine was an utter joke until the late 19th century at least. Just because the profession was resilient doesnt mean that it worked. Like priests they performed a role in society but could do little outside of offering psychological reassurance and placebos

>people used to take their drinking water from the same place where they dumped their excrement and vomits

didn't peter the great loved to promote his skills of extracting teeth at court boasting that he can do it painlessly?

>In 1685 the tooth ache had gotten so bad that the King needed to have one of his (remaining) teeth extracted. The tooth in question was a molar and it had to go. So, the King had it removed and all seemed well for a time. But his doctors had never taking into account that you probably need to have some level of hygiene when dealing with a place as filled with bacteria as the mouth. Consequently, an infection set in and the doctors decided to make the King undergo a truly horrific operation when you consider that there was no anaesthetics - not even for the King: he had to have all his teeth on his upper jaw pulled out
>When the King was having yet another tooth pulled out something went wrong and a piece of his jaw was also extracted
>After this incident, whenever the King took a drink, the beverage spouted out his nose in a fountain-like manner.
>Louis's portrait is closed-mouthed, but the sunken cheeks hint at the serious deficit within.

The dental student here. When your "milk teeth" fall out, the roots have already been re-absorbed into your body and the ligaments connecting it to your jawbones have already let go in preparation for the adult tooth. When you need an infected tooth pulled, not only does it still have most of the root + ligament structure trying to keep it inside your mouth, it's likely that the bundle of nerves inside your tooth is being gangraped by bacteria. You're going to be ripping and tearing a lot of tissue, even under anesthetic, not to mention the fact that the tooth itself is already aching.

As you can see here on the left, most of the root structure is already gone on the teeth I circled in red. On the right, that tooth was removed and took a bunch of meat with it.

>I had one of my wisdom teeth extracted without anesthetics, because my gums were too inflamed.
jesus fuck I would have referred you to the oral surgeon who can put you under sedation rather than force you to handle that without even lidocaine

>Titan Pluto
W H A T
H
A
T

You do understand that modern doctors in many areas still perform bleeding right? Its actually a cheaper, effective alternative to many medical practices that can only really be afforded in countries with a wealthy insurance system.
Yes its more dangerous than modern medical practices, but its not fucking witchcraft

Please cite me an MD that does this. I would honestly love to know if I'm wrong because that's kind of fascinating.

when you use it as a panacea it is.

again, doctors in places where modern medical practices aren't affordable. So probably no reputable western MD will (though obviously modern bloodwork is based on bleeding practices, for instance blood transfusions were first taken from horses).
But in developing countries even western-educated doctors perform bleeding, and rarely even leeching. Fluid replacement of both blood and lymph is crucial to many bodily ailments.

>also, this is what libertarians want to go back to
To be fair, one argument about that is that medical professionals would just form professional unions like the AMA, ADA, etc and internally certify doctors as being competent, so then you can just go to a doctor who has been approved by the ADA instead of Joe down the street who has pliers and quick hands.

True that a lot of medical THEORY in past eras was imaginary horseshit, but actual practices were based on observation of phenomena. Obviously not scientific observation, but to treat ancient medicine like magic is reductive.

t.underage who's never been drunk.

>You oughta be shot. Or stabbed, lose a leg. To be a surgeon, you know? Know what kind of pain you're dealing with. They make psychiatrists get psychoanalyzed before they can get certified, but they don't make a surgeon get cut on. That seem right to you?

no kidding

Now that's R A R E, good share patrician.

Me too. The doctor stung me with anaesthetics at the wrong place, and decided I was enough of a big boy not to feel the difference.
I did not screamed as he pulled 3 wisdomm teeth, but when I sat up, my back had sweat so much that a small puddle had formed on the seat.
A puddle of pain that makes me feel relief to this day that I'm not on that seat anymore.

this thread is making me ill

The difference between dead drunk and dead dead is very small. Dose is everything.

Opium was used on ancient Crete. It must have been available to the wealthy anywhere in that part of the world.

they must have been mad woke, yo.

Bro have you never blacked out?

I had dental surgery without anesthesia and it was so insanely painful that I don't remember a week or so after the incident. It's just gone.

That was 6 years ago and I can never go to the dentist again. I'm so afraid that I literally cannot bring myself to walk into the office.

Why didn’t you have anesthetic? I was put under when I got my wisdom teeth and I actually have fond memories, it was fun. I watched the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony that night on painkillers

>get adult circumcision for phimosis
>literally just get injected, about to ask why I'm having this weird taste in my mouth, wake up 30 minutes later
>get iboprofen as pain killers
I thought they were kidding me. I bought some heroin so I could feel okay. Why do they never prescribe anything that actually works? I had half a dozen cold medicines, and none of them did anything whatsoever, except for codeine syrup, which provided almost total symptomatic relief.

Infants were operated upon without anesthesia from 1900 or so until 1987. Many procedures are still done on them without anesthesia.

They had to cut my wisdom teeth out of my jaw and all I felt was the mechanical sensation of metal tools scratching against and abrading my bone, and then the teeth being yanked out, like, you feel that work is being done, but there was zero pain, it felt like watching someone tear down a wall.

In the first world too? I thought they stopped doing that a while ago. I remember reading studies on the negative psychological impact like five years ago.

There was an infection in my healing wisdom tooth hole from when the previous surgeon had left something in there.
The operating dentist said that if he used local anesthetic it would spread the infection.

probably because elective surgery would be an easy way for rich fucks to get good drugs without having any chronic conditions

For some procedures, like circumcision, only a fraction of doctors use anesthesia. They justify it saying that it doesn't matter because they won't remember.