The Grisly World Of Victorian Medicine | How The Victorians Built Britain | Absolute History

in the long reign of a single queen britain changed the world and was itself utterly transformed queen victoria came to the throne in 1837 by the time she died in 1901 we had made the modern world it was a time of brilliant engineering pioneering innovation all of it driven by fearless men and women who dreamt big and shaped the country we live in today [Music] fast and effective new transport systems shrank the world you travel further faster the railways compress space and time startling innovations above and below ground saved lives we've grabbed the saw like this it's more like carpentry than surgery groundbreaking ideas nurtured our minds and souls it was feeling like you were dancing in one of the great european palaces and a revolution in law and order set us on course for the freedoms we take for granted today you brought from the darkness of the prisons into this glory it's fantastic isn't it it is this is the story of how the victorians built britain one of the building blocks was the health of the nation in the early 1800s if you were sick or hurt the very last place you want to be taken is a hospital i think this the most chilling room in london but the victorians changed all that casualties reduced from about 50 percent to about 15 brilliant mines and bold experiments saved lives if it was good enough for a queen it was probably good enough for them as well pioneering visionaries built great cathedrals of medicine the victorian innovators would bring the nation's health into the modern age [Music] the victorians more or less invented modern health care but the good that they did had its roots in the most sinister kind of evil it was the arrest of two of britain's most notorious serial killers there was to transform the study of medicine at the turn of the century here in edinburgh and across the country anatomy schools had a major problem because dissection was considered disrespectful to the dead the only corpses available for study were murderers who'd been executed so there was a desperate need for bodies desperately so people started robbing graves within the first few days of somebody being buried people would come along dig up the body and take it to the anatomy school and sell it they say dead men tell no tales so i'm relying on janet philp here amongst the tombs of the old carlton burial ground now the most notorious names in this are birken no relation burke and hare who were they they are they are the most notorious known grave robbers and yet actually they didn't rob graves at all um so burke and hare were two irishmen who came over to work on the grand union canal william hare ran a boarding house in the west port area of edinburgh his friend william burke lived on the same street around christmas 1827 their friendship turned into something more sinister when hare discovered one of his lodges an elderly soldier known as old donald had died in his bed [Music] he died owing hair money allegedly four pounds and so burke and hare thought we can get your money back by selling the body to the anatomists the pair took old donald to dr robert knox a distinguished professor of anatomy always on the lookout for fresh cadavers he jumped at the chance to buy the body paying birkend hair nearly eight pounds substantial sum in those days so a light bulb must have gone on in birkenherr's minds at that stage dr knox he had said to them if you ever come across any more fresh bodies we'll be happy to take them off your hands but where to get the fresh ones they went straight to killing people the next victim was somebody who was in that lodging house who was getting ill so they suffocated this person with a pillow and then sold his body to the doctors over the next 10 months burke and hare quietly murdered 16 people selling their bodies on to dr knox they develop this way of killing which we now call burking after berg where they hold the nose shut put the fingers under the mouth so the mouth can't be opened either and the other person lies across the body result being you get a corpse with no mark on it no wounds no wounds looks like they've suffocated up until recently they were the most successful uk serial killers how were they rumbled in the end they had a halloween party and during this they ended up killing this this woman and hiding her under the bed uh the next day some people had been staying with burke discovered the body and they called the police the trial that followed gripped the victorian public they made up songs about the pair like this one up the close and down the stair in the house with birken hair berks the butcher hears the thief knocks the man who buys the beef dr knox was never tried but hare turned king's evidence testifying against burke for the murders he got off scot-free while burke was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging so the 28th of january 1829 between 25 to 30 000 people watched the execution [Music] and in a piece of macabre justice his body was then dissected [Music] berg's death mask lives here at the surgeon's hall museums in edinburgh but curator christopher henry tells me there's one more grisly twist to the tail william burke he was dissected but he was also flayed so all of his skin was taken off and then it was tanned and when it was turned it was sold as um as souvenirs to various people and we've got an example here this is um burke's skin pocketbook it's probably one of our most famous um artifacts so this is burke's skin is intense yes i'm not surprised you're wearing gloves oh yeah i mean it's a gruesome yeah it is it says action on the back executed 28th of um january 1829. [Music] the actions of burke and hare were a wake-up call for the medical establishment [Music] in 1832 the anatomy act was passed allowing the legal donation of bodies it was the first step towards the creation of the modern profession and some of the great medical schools and anatomical collections of the victorian age like the surgeons hall here in edinburgh giving students the chance to study the innermost workings of the human body [Music] and this speeding up of the study of anatomy produced one of the most famous if not the most famous medical textbook of all time exactly and here we have a great raised anatomy not the television not the television program the original anatomy is a landmark in medical history with text by the surgeon henry gray it's a lifetime study of the human body distilled into a book small enough to be carried around illustrated by henry carter's beautiful mind-blowingly accurate drawings [Music] the fact that each part of the illustration is labeled so it's quite clear when you look at the illustration you've got the label on the actual item that you're referring to and that doesn't sound like an earth-shattering thing but it actually was because if we talk about all of those people who are now learning medicine they were then able to have a volume that they could carry around with them and consult with known information which was reliable and i think that is one of the key things about grey's anatomy grey's anatomy was published in 1858 students and surgeons alike flocked to buy this groundbreaking road map of the human body remarkably grey's anatomy is still in print today one small perfectly formed textbook one giant leap for medical knowledge however the outlook for anyone needing an operation was less than rosy to survive the surgeon's knife you had to be very lucky indeed across britain a very victorian revolution was underway giving us the grand hospitals and world-class medical schools that we know today [Music] at its heart was a desire to map the workings of the human body despite the great strides in anatomical understanding you are still as likely as not to die on the operating table those willing to take their chances under the surgeon's knife might have been brought here to the operating theatre of old st thomas's hospital in london built in 1822 with its tiered viewing platforms the old operating theater is the only surviving victorian surgical theater in europe you can see can't you why it's called an operating theater yeah it's a very good view actually now the building is a treasure trove of grisly secrets guarded by the curator karen howell all this is packed is it all of this would be packed with medical students 150 people we think really they used to pack them in like this so they would be hanging over herring's in a barrel for the eager medical students it was a fantastic chance to watch and learn from skilled surgeons gosh they're big steps but for the patients wheeled into the packed room it was a very different story so this is it the operating table yes wooden bit of a backrest yeah but what are you just looking around uh there's no running water no there's no running water in this room at all there's a wash bowl and the idea of that was that you wash your hands afterwards as you leave the surgeon washed afterwards yeah but not before not before what sort of procedures did they do here one in five operations done here are called amputations amputations and you've got some of the instruments haven't you that the surgeons use yes we've got some instruments here this sort of knife here would be for a removal of an adult sized leg and you can see how long and fine the knives are these are very far sores and they're still used give me some idea of how this worked well the patient be brought in they're pinned down they're held down by blokes yeah the patient unfortunately is awake there's no anesthetic yeah they'll give you a leather bit so you bite on a leather bit like this because that'll stop you biting your tongue because it's very important um screaming too perhaps yeah it's very primitive but it worked we would get this blood box full of soda it's full of sawdust to stop any blood escaping and we take the knife here yeah so the leg runs through and then we we pull like this the other side pull yeah and any cuts underneath like this and the idea was that you were making an arch gosh so then we would have a person pull those flaps back that's the gory bit would grab the saw like this so can you imagine the bit the bone is visible yep all too easily and then we would go through and we know that it would be about 12 cuts bone broke through then we would take the needle often from the clothes so you bring the flaps back over so seal it off and the idea is that that now is a sealed amputation i mean it's more like carpentry isn't it than surgery it's incredibly unhygienic so what skills for a surgeon were most prized um the fact that you could do it quickly um is very important they would be trained to try for 12 minutes but the really good surgeons how fast could they take a leg off robert liston's the fastest acknowledged because it was recorded at 28 seconds he got a leg off in 28 seconds yeah the statistics were grim of those who made it through the operation half would die of post-op infection i think this in many ways is the most chilling room in london you just think what it would have been like to have been brought in here as as the patient laid out on this wooden table with 150 people craning forward to see you being cut up no anesthetics it was just something to chew on while they chopped your leg off makes you really glad to be born in the 20th century and living in the 21st century doesn't it [Music] but change was coming [Applause] while some of the great victorian innovators were altering the landscape and the lives of ordinary people in glasgow one pioneering surgeon was about to make a discovery that would change surgery forever in 1865 the scottish surgeon joseph lister introduced antiseptic surgery to the world it was a breakthrough that would revolutionize modern medicine and save millions of lives lister's brilliant flash of inspiration came from the very last place you'd expect [Music] the sewers deep in the bowels of the sewers in carlisle the authorities were trying to get rid of the unholy stink using a chemical carbolic acid [Music] lister had learned that the chemical not only reduced the smell but also reduce disease in people living nearby he began to wonder whether carbolic acid was killing germs and whether it might be the way to stop wounds from becoming infected [Music] listen's first breakthrough really was a glasgow royal infirmary on a young chap called james greenlees who had a compound fracture of the leg and lister experimented by um pouring carbolic acid into the wound and in a short space of time they realized that there actually was no infection there within a few weeks greenlee's his leg was beginning to heal very very successfully and listen knew he was on to something spurred on by this early success lister began to develop all kinds of ways to keep bacteria at bay things we take for granted today like washing hands and equipment and wearing surgical gloves but his master stroke was yet to come then listen developed this which is the carbolic steam spray and you heat it up the water to allow it to gather up ahead of steam bit like a kettle and that the front we've got this glass jar which contains the the carbolica cup acid have been there yeah it's in there and the steam came out of a nozzle at the top here so this would be puffing it out like an aerosol everywhere absolutely if you think of a kind of exotic spray can um that's pretty much what it was like that could sit on the table next to the wound and they would be able to then work within that cloud to do the operation how much of a difference was this making i think you can roughly say that the casualties were reduced from about 50 to about 15 wow so it was a big reduction in deaths how much of a turning point in the whole advance of medicine does joseph lister and antisepsis represent do you think i think it's absolutely huge it's one of the biggest really and certainly um he influenced a whole generation of people we're still really reliant on lister's ideas that brought us to where we are now lister's innovations had laid the foundations of modern medicine and saved countless lives [Music] the victorians now turned their attention to the nation's hospitals and began building the very fabric of our health care system brick by brick the immense saint thomas's hospital on the banks of the river thames in london and great ormond street the country's first ever children's hospital [Music] driven by the shockingly high infant mortality rate in london great ormond street opened in 1852 and was funded among others by charles dickens it was the first hospital to recognize that children needed tailored care and its pioneering treatments made it famous the world over but among all these distinguished victorian hospitals there was one that would leave a unique and lasting legacy [Music] this is leeds general infirmary a victorian masterpiece of hospital design it opened its doors in 1869 and has been treating patients for over 150 years professor michael warboys knows the extraordinary story of a hospital at the forefront of a revolution in healthcare [Music] the population of leeds in 1800 was 30 000 by the time this opened it was over a hundred thousand this was the state-of-the-art infirmary that an ambitious industrial town like leeds would want to have this grand vision was inspired by the ideas of a true victorian pioneer when war broke out with russia one woman's experience of the battlefield helped shape the modern hospital transforming them into places of recovery and cure she was the lady of the lamp florence nightingale stationed in a field hospital during the crimean war young florence was horrified to discover that more men were dying from disease than in battle she set about improving conditions for the soldiers with medical supplies and cleaner better ventilated wards the hell of a battlefield dressing station wasn't far removed from the conditions in britain's hospitals they were dirty dark rat infested with little ventilation and no fresh water in 1849 a single outbreak of cholera killed 200 children something had to change florence nightingale believed the layout of hospitals was the key she and others championed a blueprint called the pavilion plan with the aim to improve patients chances of recovery [Music] to what extent did leeds hospital adopt the principles that florence nightingale had been advancing her view of disease and infection was a view of where diseases emerged from bad atmospheres pollution and and disorder what nightingale and the pavilion principle was all about was what one might call the kind of halo principle one had to have hygiene air light and order [Music] the wards each with a maximum of 30 beds were built alongside courtyards and with their high ceilings and large windows the new wards were designed to let in light and fresh air minimizing the chance of patients catching disease from one another the thinking was that the hospital should do the patient no harm the length of the wards meant that the nurse could sit at one end and see 30 patients the order in the ward meant that the patients were rested they were well fed and therefore their bodies were unlikely to break down and develop disease nightingale's ideas influenced hospital design for decades the methods employed here at leeds set a gold standard for healthcare that would be adopted by hospitals in britain and across the world but for all their magnificent hospitals the victorians still had a long way to go in tackling britain's great taboo the treatment of the mentally ill the victorians were reshaping the nation's healthcare with exciting discoveries and radical reforms but the most ambitious of all was yet to come [Music] this was the era of the asylum and the psychiatric hospital when vast institutions like broadmoor would gain public notoriety but would also change our views on mental health forever [Music] in the 18th century the people with mental illness or disability were almost always kept at home and cared for secretly by their families there were a few private institutions where the wealthy could have a family member taken away and cared for discreetly if you didn't have family or money then the most likely outcome was the workhouse or prison [Music] but the victorians were about to turn the treatment of the mentally ill on its head at the science museum in london one person who understands the significance of this seismic change is natasha mcenroe at the beginning of this period was the main purpose in any way to treat people with mental illness treatment was not part of the regime particularly for the first half of the 19th century people with mental health issues were almost treated as prisoners rather than as patients for these unfortunate souls the outlook was bleak the element of restraint is very strong isn't it yes so these could range from shackles being tied to posts or to the walls in some cases for months or years or even the ubiquitous straight jacket oh you've got some here yes we have we have an adult straight jacket and very sadly one that would have been used for child patients it's an important reminder i think that children were completely mixed up with adults in psychiatric care it wasn't separate treatment at all these methods of restraint and isolation which today we regard as extreme included the infamous padded cell it is an original padded cell from farnborough hospital [Music] look at the door on it i mean once that thumb's closed and the bolts on this clip clunk across here not just locked away but you can't hear them either yeah normally if you're locked in you can hammer on a door but in here nobody can hear you horrible isn't it [Music] but in 1838 a book was published one man's expose of the horrific treatment he'd endured during three years in private asylums what sort of impact did the book have well it had a massive impact shortly after um its publication the 1845 lunacy act came out this made a massive change for the way that mental health patients were cared for in britain [Music] and this was the result [Music] every county now had a duty under law to create places that could care for people with mental health issues purpose-built asylums like this one in coney hatch sprang up all over the country natasha it's not my idea of a victorian lunatic asylum it's more it's more like a palace it's absolutely enormous yeah you're absolutely right this is a an italian eight style palace that is um disguising its real nature in typical victorian style the architecture of these new asylums was the grandest the biggest and the most beautiful it could possibly be [Music] when it opened its doors in 1851 coney hatch had beds for 1250 patients the corridors stretched for six miles but size wasn't everything what was special about it it's really the first victorian mental asylum that employed what was then called the moral treatment [Music] the moral treatment was about as far away from chaining a patient to a wall as you can imagine and coney hatch was the pioneer the treatment was very much focused on i suppose what we would now call work therapy these photographs taken inside one of the many asylums that followed coney hatch's example are a rare glimpse into the daily lives of patients [Music] there was workshops to make woodwork many of the women patients would work in the laundry they grew a lot of their own food keeping pets particularly birds were very popular caged birds but work was something that was seen as a way of rehabilitating them after decades of enlightened treatment sadly by 1890 because of overcrowding many asylums had gone back to the old methods of straightjackets and seclusion and were even using drugs to sedate unruly patients medication was to play an increasing role in the treatment of specific mental health problems in the century that followed for the victorians remedies were mainly used for physical ailments however unless you were in a hospital access to medication was pretty hit and miss most people who could called in a private doctor or turned to the all-singing all-dancing apothecary [Music] apothecaries were qualified herbalists the forerunner of the modern chemists who sold their remedies direct to patients often over the counter their shop fronts were designed to attract customers with large adverts and brightly filled jars [Music] some of the biggest names on the high street grew from the seeds of those early apothecaries vast commercial empires founded by savvy victorian entrepreneurs beechums whose patented pills were one of the most popular over-the-counter medicines andrew's liver salts still sold today and the granddaddy of high street pharmacies boots which began as a neighborhood chemists in 1849 but by the end of the victorian era had established shops on high streets up and down the country [Music] but for the early victorians getting hold of medicines meant placing your trust in the hands of the herbalist [Music] this is the herb garrett an original herbalist attic in south london where i've come to discover the dark art of the victorian apothecary these herbalists brewed and bottled all kinds of homemade pills elixirs and ointments guiding me through this cabinet of curiosities is karen howell this one we would talk about as a proper active drug yeah what's happening oh yeah what does that do then it's an anti-malarial is this something to do with quinine it's quinine that's the active so this actually does work with fever yes it does actually it works with tonic water doesn't it although some remedies actually worked others had devastating side effects belladonna eye drops might make you go blind mercury for syphilis would poison you slowly here there's a lovely bottle in the sense it's quite a scary bottle but it's an elixir of heroin and so the idea is that it would help you sleep but this is the extraordinary thing it says dose here one to two tablespoonfuls children one to two teaspoonfuls so actually you're giving children heroin yeah while the public were happily buying over-the-counter heroin european chemists have made an interesting discovery [Music] never once to miss a trick the victorians were keeping a close eye on the continent where a new wonder drug was emerging cocaine in 1879 a german doctor called vasily von andrep was experimenting with frog's legs dipping them into a solution of salt and cocaine to see what impact it had on the nervous system it turned out it numbed the nerves rather well [Music] in 1884 the viennese ophthalmologist carl curler successfully used a mild solution of cocaine to numb his patients eyes news spread fast and by 1885 cocaine's ability to numb meant it was widely used in british medicine as a cure for seasickness hay fever even common cold you could take it any number of ways you could take it as a powder dissolved in drink you could smoke cocaine cigarettes you could even inject yourself for the diy kit complete with a hypodermic syringe it would be decades before cocaine's harmful and addictive effects were discovered [Music] but how to stop pain remained one of the great medical quests of the victorian age and pain-free surgery would remain tantalizingly out of reach until one man's fantastic invention rocked the medical world the victorians had built hospitals that were the envy of the world and broken new ground in surgical practice but for all their medical advances there was one thing that had so far eluded the victorians and now they set their sights on this holy grail to make surgery pain-free [Music] we've been using anaesthetics for so long it's hard to imagine an operation without them but when victoria came to the throne surgeons were experimenting with almost anything they could lay their hands on laughing gas ether and the latest drug chloroform were all being used with very little means of controlling the dose it all sounds terribly hit and miss were the fatalities 15 year old hannah greener she was suffering from an infected toe the physician who she was being attended by thought this was a good opportunity to test the effectiveness of chloroform but unfortunately when they were administering the drug before the procedure just on a handkerchief over her face she actually died from an overdose of chloroform the press had a field day newspapers were filled with shocking stories of death by anaesthetic physicians despaired doubting whether the drug could ever be safe the solution came from a forward-thinking doctor called jon snow although snow would go on to make his name tackling the cholera epidemic in 1853 he made a breakthrough that would alter the course of medical history what jon snow does is he invents a device which can give a measured consistent dosage of anesthetic throughout a surgical procedure one of these early chloroform masks survives to this day so this is the anesthetic mask which he developed this would be attached to to a tube which would then connect to a bottle filled with a small rag soaked in chloroform you can see on the inside that there are various different valves in there which when you put this on much the same way as a modern surgical surgical mask just like this it would regulate the dosage consistently throughout the surgical procedure and this became known as the snow mask [Music] and what difference did that make it meant that you could standardize dosages across a lot of different surgical procedures you could get yourself a snow mask make sure that you put a little bit of chloroform in the bottle and be more confident that your your patients wouldn't uh wouldn't suffer fatal consequences during operation not surprisingly the public was still cautious about chloroform but all that changed when snow got an invitation from a very special patient the key contribution was when snow was invited to administer chloroform to queen victoria for the birth of her last two children she'd been actually keen to try it earlier but some of her personal physicians had warded her off the idea it must have been a nerve-wracking few hours for dr snow but his pioneering mask worked the queen delivered her baby safely and by all accounts she was delighted later she referred to chloroform as that blessed chloroform so clearly her influence in the public domain praising its effects and crediting it with a less painful childbirth that had a major impact on convincing skeptical publics that chloroform was safe and well if it was good enough for a queen soon to be an empress yeah it was probably good enough for them as well with the queen's blessing anaesthetics had arrived one of the greatest surgical advancements of the victorian age however cutting a body open was still a risky business what was needed was to be able to look inside without going inside but how could that be possible the idea was pure science fiction while victorian writers like h.g wells were thrilling their readers with tales of machines that could travel through time [Music] a dazzling discovery by a german scientist gave victorians a machine that could see through skin right inside the human body these are some of the first films of x-rays shown in 1897 a flexing frog's leg [Music] a beating human heart and even a stomach in action the victorians revolutionized surgery from being the last resort for the truly desperate to being literally the cutting edge of healthcare in britain six months after their discovery x-rays were being used by battlefield surgeons to locate bullets and wounded soldiers with technology as advanced as this medicine was entering a futuristic age [Music] britain's medical outlook was transformed under the victorians hospitals became sanitized palaces of healing and treatment surgical pioneers pushed the boundaries of anatomy devising the life-saving procedures we depend on today and britain's mentally ill were finally treated with humanity and care the innovation and fearless campaigning of victorian medical reformers laid the foundations for the national health service we owe them a great deal next time i explore the harshness of the victorian prison regime they would quite literally put salt into the prisoner's wounds learn how the police bagged the age's most notorious criminals we do have some of the real-life peaky blinders their photographs were taken right here and i discover how the era witnessed a law and order revolution if you came up in these courts it must have been a mighty frightening experience

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 376,704

Keywords: history documentaries, absolute history, world history, ridiculous history, quirky history

Id: P87vWLQYgl0

Length: 42min 51sec (2571 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021