You lie on the operating table and wake up from a dream, thinking the operation is over, relieved.
The next second, however, a sharp object hits your abdomen and cuts an incision.
The sharp pain of the drill heart strikes, the blood gushes, and a pair of hands hold your internal organs.
You want to run away, but you can't feel the presence of your limbs, you can't even move a finger; you try to open your eyes, but your eyelids are thousands of pounds; you shout with all your strength, but your vocal cords are like stuck, and you can't make a sound.
Fear engulfs you, but alas, no one finds out that you are awake.
This pain of life is worse than death, which is the "near-death experience" of anesthesia failure during surgery.
The purpose of anesthesia is to reduce the pain of the patient during surgery.
However, the technique of general anesthesia was not invented until the middle of the 19th century. In the era of underdeveloped anesthesia, performing a surgical operation was equivalent to being soberly subjected to torture.
How did humans do surgery at that time? Raw planing?
In seventeenth-century Europe, where wars were frequent, medical equipment was scarce, and surgery was mostly simple and crude, doctors often used some fast-acting "anesthesia" methods, such as stick hemp.
There is no one who can't put down a stick, and if there is, then another stick.
The emergence of stick hemp has greatly solved the problem of difficult treatment, because most patients are knocked into mental retardation, and a small number of people have not yet undergone surgery, and people have disappeared.
Others are less violent, such as bloodletting anesthesia, which bleeds the patient until he is in a coma and shock, or binding limbs and compressing nerves to numb them.
All in all, these physical anesthesia methods are all about making the patient jump back and forth between alleviating pain and sending him to heaven.
If you travel back 300 years to an amputation, you might experience something like this—
You are briefly unconscious when two doctors grab your limbs and press them on a blood-stained bed, and a stick from nowhere is slammed into your head.
Then the operation begins, a sharp knife is plunged into your injured leg, and the skin is cut along with the muscles.
After the bones were exposed, the doctor pulled out another saw and began to output like sawn wood.
When the bone is cut, it is time to stop the bleeding. The doctor brought the skin and flesh back to its place, picked up the soldering iron and scalded it, well, it was the smell of meat.
After the operation, if you are still lucky enough to be alive, it is a big fate. After all, the mortality rate of surgery in that period was as high as 60%.
And because the anesthesia effect is not good, the patient may pass out in severe pain and then wake up in severe pain.
In order to alleviate the pain of the patient, the first principle of the doctor's surgery is: fast!
For example, the Russian doctor Pirogov can saw off his thigh in 3 minutes;
French doctor Lauret has set a record for more than 200 amputations performed in a row for 24 hours.
Among the many fast knife hands, the British surgeon Liston is extremely talented, he can unload his arm in 28 seconds and saw his leg in 2 minutes and 30 seconds.
But too fast is not a good thing, during an operation, Liston went down, the patient's thigh came down, the assistant's fingers also came down, and the onlookers on the side were frightened to die suddenly on the spot.
Within a few days, the patient and the assistant also died of infection. One surgery set a record for a mortality rate of 300%.
Of course, this can not be entirely blamed on Liston, in the era of no anesthesia, the knife is not fast, the flesh hurts.
Coupled with no disinfection and no hemostasis, the chance of successful survival is lower than the winning rate of Russian roulette.
Until October 16, 1846, the first case of ether inhalation anesthesia surgery was successful, modern medical anesthesia took the stage, and the era of "Little Li Flying Knife" ended.
Nowadays, anesthesia is safer and more controllable, put on a breathing mask, or get a shot, you will sink to sleep, wake up, and the operation will end safely.