At Home - Bill Bryson [180]
Burney’s account of the experience is almost unbearably excruciating because of the very calmness with which she relays its horrors. Almost as bad as the event itself was the torment of awaiting it. As the days passed, the anxiety of apprehension became almost crushing, and was made worse when she learned on the morning of the appointed day that the surgeons would be delayed by several hours. In her diary she wrote: “I walked backwards and forwards till I quieted all emotions, and became, by degrees, nearly stupid—torpid, without sentiment or consciousness—and thus I remained till the clock struck three.”
At that point she heard four carriages arrive in quick succession. Moments later, seven grave men in black came into the room. Burney was given a drink to calm her nerves—she didn’t record what, but wine mixed with laudanum was the usual offering. A bed was moved into the middle of the room; old bedding was placed on it so as not to spoil a good mattress or linens.
“I now began to tremble violently,” Burney wrote, “more with distaste and horror of the preparations even than of the pain.… I mounted, therefore, unbidden, the bedstead, and M. Dubois placed me upon the mattress, and spread a cambric handkerchief upon my face. It was transparent, however, and I saw through it that the bedstead was instantly surrounded by the seven men and my nurse. I refused to be held; but when, bright through the cambric, I saw the glitter of polished steel—I closed my eyes.” Learning that they intended to remove the whole breast, she surrendered herself to “a terror that surpasses all description.” As the knife cut into her, she emitted “a scream that lasted intermittingly during the whole time of the incision—and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still, so excruciating was the agony. When the wound was made, and the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished … but when again I felt the instrument—describing a curve—cutting against the grain, if I may say so, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left—then, indeed, I thought I must have expired. I attempted no more to open my eyes.”
But still the operation went on. As the surgeons dug away diseased tissue, she could feel and hear the scrape of the blade on her breastbone. The entire procedure lasted seventeen and a half minutes, and it took her months to recover. But the operation saved her life. She lived another twenty-nine years and the cancer never came back.
Not surprisingly, people were sometimes driven by pain and a natural caution regarding doctors to attempt extreme remedies at home. Gouvernor Morris, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, killed himself by forcing a whalebone up his penis to try to clear a urinary blockage.
The advent of surgical anesthetics in the 1840s didn’t eliminate the agony of medical treatments very often so much as postpone it. Surgeons still didn’t wash their hands or clean their instruments, so many of their patients survived the operations only to die of a more prolonged and exquisite agony through infection. This was generally attributed to “blood poisoning.” When President James A. Garfield was shot in 1881, it wasn’t the bullet that killed him, but doctors sticking their unwashed fingers in the wound. Because anesthetics encouraged the growth of surgical procedures, there was in fact probably a very considerable net increase in the amount of pain