What Surgery Was Like Before Anesthesia

Modern medicine has made things so much easier for us, with vaccines, antibiotics, chemotherapy, and anesthesia, among other modern miracles. But surgery itself is pretty old. What was that like before we had knockout drugs? Do you really want to know? Back then you didn't want surgery ever, unless it was a life-or-death situation. Yeah, you could drink alcohol, but that came with its own problems, like making uncontrollable bleeding more likely. Harder drugs were tried, but they might just kill you. However, this TED-Ed video is not misery porn about the agony of surgery while awake; there's just a small bit about that before they go through the history of how relatively safe and effective modern anesthetics were developed. It was a bumpy ride from there to where we are now.

The comments at YouTube have hundreds of anesthesia stories, almost all of which are positive, even from people who were terrified of surgery. -via Digg