h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

After the last fiasco ...

I legally practice medicine with no formal training.
Where am I
When am I
And what one rule must I obey.

An apprentice surgeon, say 18th Century?

Medical qualifications and tuition not being what they are today, young pipsqueaks were taken to do an apprenticeship of sorts, get a bit of on the job training, and become a surgeon. Common practice on Nelson's ships and the like. So they were practicing medicine with no formal training.

And the rule they must obey was presumably to do as they're told and be seen and not heard.

No sorry some what wide of the mark but +1 DGI for British Navy though there was qualified supervision (most of the time)

Are you a barber in England a couple of hundred years ago or earlier, and do you have a red and white striped pole outside your shop?

On the subject of barber-surgery

Sir Robert Liston was the fastest saw in the west; his trade was amputations; in an era before anaesthetics (or for that matter antiseptics) his reputation was built not on care or necessarily skill or neatness but on speed.

Liston could remove a limb in 28 seconds, with the patient fully conscious, but tightly bound...

Legs took longer.

He was six foot two, and operated in a bottle-green coat with Wellington boots. He sprung across the bloodstained boards upon his swooning, sweating, strapped down patient like a duelist, calling "Time me, gentlemen, time me!" to students craning with pocket watches across the iron-railings in galleries. To free both hands, Liston would clasp the bloody tools between his teeth.

Famously, in his haste, Liston once removed, along with the man's leg, his testicles with a wayward slice of the saw. I don't think he survived to sue.

Liston also took part in the deadliest operation in history: while removing a gangrenous leg, in a difficult operation lasting more than two and a half minutes, Liston extracted the gangrene saw with a jerk and accidentally removed two of his assistant's fingers.
In the days when major surgery was a popular tourist attraction for a certain class of Gentleman, the errant trajectory of the saw blade sliced through the tail coat of a spectatior who was so aghast to have his apparrel shredded that he dropped dead from fright. Next to go was the patient, who died of their gangrene, as did the eight-fingered assistant whose sudden onset of septicaemia proved fatal.

It was (and I think remains) the only single operation in history to achieve a 300% mortality score.

But not to tarnish Liston's reputation too much, he did later perform the very first operation under the newly discovered anaesthetic , Ether, - the first such operation in Europe At University College Hospital on 21st December 1846. This was after Ether had been demonstrated earlier that year on October 16th, by it's discoverer William Morton.
Liston's patient upon waking was heard to say: “When are you going to begin? Take me away; I can’t have it off; I must die as I am” before being shown the operation was already completed.

Yes, but also to be fair, speed was an absolute necessity at that particular time as patients often died of shock, bleeding or infection. Speed in the removal of limbs therefore minimised the risk of all three.
So he wasn't quite the cowboy that some make out.

Nice post though

No not the one I am looking for to long ago OB but +3 DGI

+6 QI Clive for post 5

And to early in period Clive

>>he wasn't quite the cowboy that some make out.<<

Quite true. Speed was vital before anaesthetics were discovered (a tradition continued in other fields of surgery: heart surgery and cardio-vascular operations, for example which were pioneered after the first world war used to have a 4 minute time limit. The survival rate was horrifically low as you might imagine.)

This only began improving mid-way through the 20th century with the development of better understanding of hypothermia, much improved sterilisation and hygiene and of course, dialysis (John Heysham Gibbon developed the technology and built the first - called the Heart and Lung Pump)

So perhaps I emphasised Liston's haste in those operations but he was perhaps the best at what he did in a very bad age and that 300% figure always makes me laugh.

homeopahic praticioner
england
now
can't write prescriptions

You're a rabbi performing circumcisions. And you're only allowed to do them on boys

Getting near Taff the time is correct +1
The rest is wrong however

Global Village Idiot

No not right but +2 DGI

retro phrenologist
the disc
now
don't kill anyone

No taff

Is it religiously-based medicine, in that case? Is it now legal under anti-discrimination law, so long as you don't claim there's a scientific basis?

The one rule you must obey....

First, do no harm.



'g'

Chinese herbalist??



'g'

No G
To legally practice medicine with no formal training. That is not the rule the law requires.