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So Western medicine eradicated smallpox prevented polio and [Man contracts smallpox and develops a rash]

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figured out all kinds of other good stuff. but here's a fun little fact until

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around the Civil War surgeries were performed without anesthesia we're

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talking amputation brain surgeries and appendix removal all while the patient [Doctor performing surgery on a patient without anesthesia]

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was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed of course if somebody had a bushy tail

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it really should have been removed in the ancient world doctors and scholars

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all over the world experimented with different methods of reducing pain in [doctors concocting new drugs mixing substances]

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surgery and when we say experimented we mean they made people eat weird stuff

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and then operated on em well the most common treatments were various herbs and

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plants I'm sure many were slightly toxic but what's a little poison when it might [doctor operating on a patient]

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offer numbness or unconsciousness while a doctor slices off a body part of

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course the problem with wild herbs is that it's tough to get a consistent

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dosage the potency of plants depends on several different things how old [one plant yelling at another plant]

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they are how much water they've gotten well not knowing the potency of the

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active ingredients in the plants made it tricky to know how much to give a

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patient too little in the patient could feel every little pinpricks too much in [doctor uses a pin to prick the patient's neck]

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the patient couldn't feel anything usually because they were dead

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well one useful substance to come out of this era was called Mandrake this is [Doctor holding a bottle labelled Mandrake]

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probably news to the folks who thought Mandrake for mythical creatures who

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spoke and were made up by JK Rowling in reality Mandrake was a narcotic plant

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first discovered by the Babylonians around 2,000 BCE it was pretty effective [Babylonian man holding a mandrake]

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as far as old school anesthesia went except for the teensy little fact that

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it was easy to accidentally poison somebody with it [doctor poisoning a patient with mandrake]

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Oh sometimes instead of preventing pain it just caused hallucinations well the [man hallucinating riding a unicorn over a rainbow]

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one thing worse than feeling every cut of a doctor's knife is hallucinating

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that the doctor is a purple monster while he's doing the cutting

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well another early painkiller was opium and it was a real game-changer [lots of red flowers in a large field]

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opium is a drug made from poppy flowers it's about 10% morphine and forms the

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raw material for stuff like heroin and hydrocodone, yep it's dangerously addictive

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[doctor injecting patient with opium to relieve pain] but it's also a heck of an effective painkiller people all over the ancient

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world from Indians to Greeks to Sumerians began to cultivate it

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intentionally and use it for medicinal and you know recreational purposes of

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course addiction was a real issue just like it is with opioid painkillers today [People in a meeting discussing addiction]

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also it didn't make patients unconscious and the danger of overdose was pretty

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high well despite all that opium was still the best bet for pain killing

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until well into the 19th century so we'll make modern anesthesia reason 1

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million and one on our list of reasons we're glad to have been born in modern [person scribbling anesthesia on a piece of paper]

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times for the record number one is the toilet

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