Unsanitary In The Victorian Era

A cowering victims lies on a table, restrained so he can’t struggle. A man wearing a blood encrusted apron stands before him with a bloody knife in his hand. A throng of spectators wait in awe. Anaesthesia hasn’t been invented yet, so the quivering victim lies completely conscious on the operating table. As the saw dust settles on the floor, the “surgeon” begins to carve into the patient’s flesh. The patient screams in agony. If he’s lucky, he’ll live through this. Even if he does, there’s a good chance he’ll die later of an infection. Until the end of the Victorian era, this is what the experience of surgery was like. It was a scary and macabre area of the medical community. Although people in the Victorian era used to fear for their lives

Firstly, surgeons did not wear clean aprons when operating; they wore street clothes (Nastasi). When the surgeons did wear aprons, they were not regularly cleaned, and became literally caked in blood. In fact, it was believed that the more blood stains you had on your apron, the more seniority you had as a surgeon because it meant you have performed more operations (Nastasi). They were almost like “badges of honor” (Zhang). In addition, no one ever sterilized the operating theatre or cleaned the instruments, so bacteria and blood would be left behind and could cause infections (Nastasi). Surgeons didn’t even bother to wash their hands (Nastasi). As mentioned earlier, surgery was a source of entertainment for some people, so when large crowds of spectators would enter without being sterilized, they would bring even more bacteria and increase the chance of infection (Nastasi). The methods for collecting excess blood were also very unsanitary. A wooden was placed under the patient to catch any blood and pus that might spill over, and saw dust was spread around the floor to collect blood (Fitzharris). Because surgeries were not sanitary, many patients died of a post-surgical infection (Fitzharris). The term for what was killing patients was then called hospital disease, but is now called sepsis. Sepsis is the infection of the blood by disease producing organisms, or germs (Cartwright). Before the invention of antiseptic, sepsis was the result of poor