2024-02-13 12:35:19
The oldest operating room preserved in Europelocated in the heart of London, dates back to 1822 when his operating table saw a patient pass by for the first time, when There was no anesthesia or antiseptics.
The women’s operating room at the former Saint Thomas Hospital was created 67 years later than the men’s, when the Industrial Revolution pushed women to leave the domestic sphere and start working in factoriessuffering accidents and injuries with machinery that until then had suffered mainly men, such as farmers, peasants or soldiers.
“Suddenly there were many more women in need of surgical interventions, exactly the same as those of men,” says Monica Walker, curator of the operating room installation and its museum, The Old Operating Theater Museum and Herb Garrett, located near London Bridge, on the former site of Saint Thomas Hospital.
The oldest operating room preserved in Europe saw a patient pass for the first time in 1822, when there were no anesthesia or antiseptics (EFE).
Faced with this increase in accidents, they set up a small wooden amphitheater in the attic of an adjacent church and opened a door to connect it with the rest of the hospital facilities, creating a small operating room that is currently restored and is part of the museum. maintaining original elements.
In this place, now converted into a museum, you can see skeletons and atlases with which anatomy was studied, knives for amputations and all kinds of tools from the 18th and 19th centuries that illustrate how all kinds of specialties were practiced back then, from interventions eyepieces even gynecological exams.
Operated under the eyes of students
The operating table located in the center of the amphitheater recalls how the final year medical students They watched from the stands the surgeons’ procedures and techniques: limb amputations and mastectomies, lithotomies (removal of stones from the bladder) and trepanations (drilling of the skull to treat head trauma).
The doctors did not wash their hands before the operation and used and reused their blood-soaked aprons (EFE).
“The students would have been arranged around the theater chamber and would be wearing their daily clothes,” notes Walker. “Many of them would have come with cigarettes, smoking was allowed inside the operating room. You can imagine that this space would have had a lot of smoke,” he explains.
Hygiene did not keep the surgeons of those times up at night, who did not know the incidence of germs or antiseptics. They didn’t wash their hands before the operation and used and reused their blood-soaked aprons as a mark of their great career in the operating room.
These were the conditions that one of the protagonists who have investigated in the museum, Elizabeth Raigen, 60 years old, surely encountered when she entered this operating room at noon on April 29, 1824 so that Dr. Travers might amputate her leg, under the natural light that came in through the skylight on the roof.
Two out of every three patients who underwent surgery at the old Saint Thomas hospital, which treated lower-class people, survived (EFE).
He had been admitted to Saint Thomas Hospital ten days earlier with an open fracture in his tibia and the gangrene threatened certain death if he did not undergo surgery. Without anesthesia, Raigen had to endure twenty minutes of an operation that on average used to be ten times faster: two minutes.
According to what “The Lancet” magazine published days later, Raigen came out of the operating room alive (“the brandy and wine administered revived her a little”) but He died three days later. on Monday, May 3.
Even so, as surprising as it may be now, there were more who ended up surviving. (two out of three) following the surgery at the old Saint Thomas hospital, which cared for lower class people.
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