Quacks is the BBC comedy from Rev's James Wood in the unlikely setting of an 1840s hospital ward. "It's a fascinating time," says Ross Macfarlane, a researcher at the Wellcome Trust who helped ensure the show's gruesome science is grounded in reality. "It's the real founding of what we'd now consider medicine." He walks WIRED through a 19th-century surgery - worth remembering at your next check-up.
In 1840, sterile theatres are out. "You are almost seeing ideas coming from Joseph Lister (who pioneered sterile surgery), but not quite yet," says Macfarlane. Instead, surgery was a formal (if rather bloody) affair. "They'd be dressed in their finery, not in hospital gowns."
General anaesthetic? No chance. Instead, the period was characterised by doctors, ahem, self-dosing. Nitrous oxide laughing gas, or "hippy crack", "was beginning to be used, particularly in dentistry," says Macfarlane. The bad news: patients on it tended to wake up on the table.
One alternative? Hypnosis. "Hypnotism and mesmerism were promoted as a serious practice," says Macfarlane. The problem was it didn't work. Its chief proponent, John Elliotson, was attacked as a fraud - and, thankfully, medicine eventually snapped out of it.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
