Physicians were not expected to either draw blood or perform
surgeries. These tasks were the
responsibility of the surgeons, or the barber-surgeons. Their training was even worse than the
physicians, and they often got stuck with jobs the physicians did not want,
such as in prisons and on ships during war.
Other than bleeding, surgeries were very rare, since everyone knew the
dangers of infection although they did not know how infections were
passed. The typical surgeries were
cutting out cancers of the skin and breast, removal of stones in the bladder,
tonsillectomies, drilling holes in the scalp to relieve pressure on the brain,
and amputations. No clean surgery rooms in this age – surgeries were performed
on wooden operating tables with sawdust on the floor to absorb the blood. Surgeries were short – a good surgeon took out bladder stones in
30 seconds to a minute and amputated a leg in 2-4 minutes (Olsen, 262-64).
Surgeons knew more about anatomy than physicians. In London surgeons had to have served a 7
year apprenticeship, whereupon they became members of the Worshipful Company of
Barber-Surgeons. The barbers did
blood-letting, extracted teeth, shaved beards and heads, and made wigs. Since the barbers sold condoms, their
partners the surgeons ended up being the experts at venereal disease (Waller,
86-89).
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