History RaeTold

The Illustrious Medical Career of dr. Robert Knox; or, Fuck It, Let’s Amputate All the Limbs

Gather round, kiddos, and I’ll tell you a story about the man who put the “theatre” into “operating theatre”.

Now back in the day, before the invention of WebMD, the medical solution to almost anything was hacking off a limb. Broken leg? Saw it off. Infection? Off with your arm. Headache? Cut off your fucking feet and be done with it. People were mostly fine with this because previous catch-all solutions to injuries had included putting leeches on your face, strapping a shaved chicken to your body, drilling a hole in your fucking skull to release pressure, and some good old fashioned institutionalisation in a negligent and abusive mental hospital. So, in comparison, the limb-sawing seemed fairly reasonable.

Guys, medical history is WILD. I recommend you all take a day off work to wiki it.

The issue with all the amputations was that anaesthetic hadn’t been invented by that point, so people were strapped to a table and plied with booze while everyone just hoped for the best. This meant that speed was of the absolute essence – the longer you took to do an amputation, the more likely your entirely-conscious patient was to die. So surgeons were expected to SMASH that thing off at speed, while the patient thrashed and screamed in agony. Plus, they did it all WITH AN AUDIENCE of students and other doctors, who I assume chanted “OFF OFF OFF” like they were watching a gladiatorial execution or a striptease at a stag do.

Not only this, but hygiene standards were horrendous, with the theatre floorboards generally stained with blood and all the surgeons operating in frock coats because what’s more important while sawing off the leg of a screaming woman while wading in a pool of her blood than looking fancy? Those who survived the blood loss generally died of some kind of infection. Shockingly.

So you can imagine the kind of pressure these doctors were under.

In the midst of all this, there was one doctor who was the bossest of bosses at speedy limb-hacking. Robert Liston was a Scottish-born surgeon with a flair for sawing off arms and looking good doing it (and occasionally killing a bunch of people through medical negligence, but hey, it was the 19th century so they should just count themselves lucky it wasn’t the plague) (disclaimer: my grasp of the timeline of world history is shaky at best).

After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, our boy Robert got on the wrong side of the New Town medical community by INSISTING on treating The Poors instead of just letting them die of easily treatable ailments as God intended. So they forced him out of Scotland down to the deepest south (London) where he continued practising medicine, but now with added pizzazz.

Dr. Rob became known as “the fastest knife in the West End” which is really cool unless you’ve actually been to the West End of London in which case it just sounds exhausting and stressful. Famously, he could amputate a leg in 2.5 minutes, with some claiming he could do it in as little as 28 seconds, and would hold the blood-covered knife in his teeth so he had both hands free for the sawing. He was also a bit of a showman, and would swagger into the blood-stained theatre in a jazzy green coat and wellies (because he was nothing if not a practical man, and there was about to be a fuckton of blood), dramatically brandishing his knife and yelling at the watching students to time him.

As you can imagine, there is a reason why flamboyant high-speed amputations are not medically recommended these days, in this boring, politically-correct time of people not dying of gangrene and blood loss during routine surgeries. Along with his successes, Robert also regularly fucked up in a very dramatic way. Once, he successfully amputated a man’s leg in less than three minutes, but in his enthusiasm also sawed off the patient’s balls, which I imagine the guy was not thrilled about. Another time, he casually lanced what he believed was a boil on a small boy’s neck. Turns out it was an arterial abrasion and the kid bled out and died. Great story, though.

But perhaps his most famous surgical fuck-up was another leg amputation. He swaggered into the surgery in his snazzy green coat, waving his knife as all the spectators chanted his name (disclaimer: I can’t verify this part but I can only assume this is what happened). His assistant then held down the writhing, screaming man while he hacked off his leg in 2.5 minutes flat. Unfortunately, due to all his somewhat unnecessary flourishing with the knife, he also cut off his assistant’s fingers. As you do. Both the assistant and the patient later died of gangrene, because it was the 1800s and reasonable medical hygiene standards were something that happened to other people.

BUT THAT WASN’T ALL. No, during his wild knife-brandishing, he also cut off the tails of an older doctor’s coat. The old man was so stressed out by this flagrant disrespect for fashion that he dropped to the floor, had a heart attack and died, making this the only surgery in history with a 300% mortality rate.

Though Rob ended up being largely famous for this insane slaughter of surgical bystanders, he did some cool shit too. During one particularly badass incident, he full-on punched out another doctor in the middle of his theatre, in front of all his students. The reason? A super hot woman called Mary Paterson. Mary was, as mentioned, a hottie (this will later become relevant, I’m not just a pervert), but she was also very much dead, having been a victim of notorious serial killers Williams Burke and Hare. The doctor who was responsible for dissecting her body was none other than Dr. Robert Knox.

Yeah? Robert Knox? Everyone’s heard of him, right? How’s your serial killer knowledge? The Shipman of the 19th century? No?

Ok, fine, whatever. Robert Knox was an Edinburgh-based doctor who was famous for being the guy who bought all his cadavers from Burke and Hare, despite clearly knowing they were murder victims, and was even implicated in many of the murders himself. Absolute shithead, he was.

So Robert Knox had recently purchased beautiful murder victim Mary Paterson, but instead of just dissecting her and moving on, he had her embalmed in whisky and displayed in his surgery in a “voyeuristic” manner for three months because men are, and always have been, utterly fucking disgusting.

But our boy Rob Liston was having none of this. He walked into Knox’s surgery, punched him in the entire face, knocking him on his arse in front of his students, and made off with Mary’s body to be properly buried.

What a hero.

Robert Liston was also a big supporter of anaesthetic, presumably because he’d realised that operating on conscious, screaming patients was proving significantly more amputatey than intended, and was the first person in Europe to perform surgery on an anaesthetised patient. It was successful, something for which we’re all exceedingly grateful.

Despite all the unnecessary bloody deaths he may have called, Robert Liston ended up being highly praised in the medical community. On his death, a committee was formed to decide how to commemorate him, and ended up getting a lovely marble bust carved of his head, which is a perfectly normal thing to do when someone dies.