Oh What A Time... - #197 Surgery & Monkeys Eating Musical Instruments (Part 2)

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re travelling through time to see how surgery has been performed through the ages! We’ll head to 990AD to see what surgical innovation followed a monkey eating some musical instruments, the amazing (and odd) history of artificial resuscitation, and a brief history of how humans have reset and healed broken bones.Elsewhere, we’re just so pleased to live in the iPad age of child entertainment whilst travelling. And: are you a ‘map of the world girl or guy’? For this and anything else, you can email us here: [e-mail] if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh Watertime is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else. Add free. Plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the O Watertime Group chat. Plus if you become an O Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis, will riff on your name to postulate

where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O Watertime. Hello and welcome to part two of surgery. Let's get on with the show. All right, the wait is over. Who is ready for a brief history of artificial respiration? Yes, please. Are you boys familiar with the phrase blowing smoke up your ass?

Yes. Yes. It's today, in 2026, it's a metaphor for insincere flattery. But in the 18th century, blowing smoke up your ass was a serious government-sanction medical procedure. Really? Yes. I didn't know those smoke included in this. Well, it's not just smoke.

So I've said so far, the headline is that there was a common phenomenon where doctors, medical professionals would try to bring you back to life. For example, if you just drowned, if you were close to death, they would try to bring you back to life by blowing not just air up your. ass, tobacco smoke. A tobacco enema. Okay. So this form... Like your Shisha pipe? Not a million miles away. Okay.

So it was a form of artificial respiration. It was performed by, you probably imagine it, inserting a tube into the rectum. Now, at the other end of this tube, what have you got? You've got a set of bellows. And the bellows. And the bellows, what are they pump? into your ass.

They're pumping tobacco smoke into the intestines in the hope of reviving an unconscious person. Now, this is astonishing to me. What's even more astonishing is the fact, like I say, it was government sanctioned. The devices to blow tobacco smoke up your ass were known as resuscitators. By the late 1700s, they were installed along the banks of the Thames in London,

much as defibrillators and life belts are today. Like, yeah, I was going to say, like, defibs. No. When is this, sorry, this is the late 1700s. Wow. It was a very popular means of trying to bring someone back to life. Yeah. So if you get one of those, if your friend has a heart attack and you need to use one of those,

do make sure you're playing the right end. Because if that has just been sat there for hundreds of previous customers, you want to make sure you're bringing wet wipes at the very least. Yeah. Wow. So if you choose to use your one-day time machine to go back to the late 1700s in London and you fall in the River Thames, you almost drown and you get pulled out,

it's likely you're going to get a tobacco enema from someone passing by the river. Yeah, so in the late 1700s, these resuscitators were installed along the banks of the Thames so that if people were pulled from the river that's still alive, the smoke was there ready to be blown up your southern orifice. Wow. What's the logic here, though?

Is it the logic, it makes you cough? What happens? What sorts of things? So if we rewind the clock, when the resuscitators are on the banks of the Thames, if we rewind the clock to the mid-1600s. So for physicians of the time... It's not as sexy as Baywatch, is it? Hasselhoff, Pamela Anderson running in slow motion.

My God, that's a great idea, crane. Or someone by the Thames with a pipe shoving up someone's half. Here's a show pitch. Baywatch 1600s, life cards along the Thames in the mid-17th century. That's so funny. That can be good.

Hasselhoffs already said yes. Everyone gets a tobacco enema. Would watch. Would watch. If we go back to the mid-1600s, so for physicians of the time, the appropriate treatment for what was deemed apparent death, So if you drowned, if you would appear close to death, the way they would try to bring you back to life was essentially provide warmth and stimulation. And this is essentially where the idea of the tobacco enema is born because the hot tobacco smoke inside you is thought to be warming you up and bringing you back to life, essentially.

That's the rough theory. One of the reasons why the concept of the tobacco enema really caught on is one particular incident, which happened in Oxford in 1650. Why couldn't they just do like hot chocolate down the throat or something like that? If it's warming up or just like silver blanket, you get the end of a marathon, why does it have to be smoke up my anus?

There's other ways to warm me up. Hot water bottle? It just feels like a very dramatic choice. If your aim is to warm me up, do we need to use that as the option? Yeah, just put a jumper on my shoulders. Exactly. Exactly.

So to relay why tobacco enemers really caught on, I've got to take you to Oxford Castle on the 14th of December, 1650. And there being hanged for murder is Anne Green. She was an English domestic servant. She'd been accused of committing infanticide in 1650. She'd basically given birth to a dead fetus and then tried to cover up that she'd given birth to the fetus, was caught, and then therefore accused of murder.

It does seem very harsh. And good news, she was. We'll be pardoned for this. So, 14 December 1650, she's been found guilty of murder. She's hanged at Oxford Castle. And while she's hanging her friends on her own request, pull down on her to expedite her death. About half an hour later, she's finally cut down. And her body is handed over to University of Oxford physicians for dissection.

The morning after her execution, the physician's opened Green's coffin. And guess what? She's still alive. She had a faint pulse and was weak. and was weakly breathing. So this is where the tobacco enema comes in because they give Anne Green the tobacco enema. They also pour hot cordial down her throat.

Again, they're trying to warm her up, stimulator, lots of rubbing of her extremities. They actually do some bloodletting as well. But amazingly, after 12 hours, she begins to recover. She starts speaking, and within one month, she had fully recovered from her own execution. Wow. And lots of people pointed to the tobacco enema as being responsible for saving her life effectively.

And then because she had recovered from the execution, she was granted a pardon because people saw it as like an act of God that she had survived her own execution. That's incredible. Mad story. That's incredible. I think if I was wrongfully hung by the river in Oxford and you guys tried to rescue me by pulling me down, you'd end up just pulling my trousers down, I'd rain up there. It'd just be really unthinkified. Just wouldn't come down.

Trowers now on my ankle. And then you'd be like, we can't get him down. Oh, well. We did try. We did our best. We did our best. It doesn't feel like our best, but it was our best. It was our best.

So there we go. That's why the tobacco enema became so popular. It eventually, through the 1800s, fell out of popularity, as people realized. that this is an utter waste of time and better techniques came in. But if we were to rewind the clock back to the second century

AD, Greco-Roman physician Gallen observed that if you took a dead animal and blew air through its windpipe using a reed, its lungs would inflate. He also documented the tracheotomy. How have you found that out, Gallen? What has happened? He's pre-Ip-pads, isn't he?

Gallin's pre-Ipads. It's the equivalent of you coming up with songs on a blonde car journeys. It's just he's not that he's older than you. This guy cannot be a vet. Yeah, this guy, Gallen, this Greco-Roman physician,

he also documented the tracheotomy cutting into the windpipe to open an airway. Wow. We've spoken about Gallen quite a lot, actually. He is someone who's genuinely come up in a lot of our things. He's obviously one of the key writer on medicine. So then, in December 1732, a Scottish doctor called William Tossack

was called to an accident at a coal mine in Alowa. A miner named James Blair had been overcome by noxious fumes underground and was to all appearances dead, but Tosak did something remarkable and at the time basically unprecedented in medical literature. He performed what we would now call mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He wrote about it years later in 1744, describing the moment. Shall I try and do the accent? I applied my mouth coast to his and blowed my breath as strong as I could, but having neglected to stop his nostrils, or the air came out of them. Good all Alex Ferguson.

I mean the Premier League titles, Champions League titles in Ventimov to Moe. Tosak worked out that you had to basically pinch the nose to create a proper seal and it worked. This guy Blair, who gained consciousness and was back down the mind within a week. Imagine that.

Nearly dying of not just huge. They were tough guys, man. Also, it's a choice to be the first guy to do mouth to mouth to mouth, isn't it, on someone? Because it's all intents to persons to people watching, you're just now kissing a cop. With none of the understanding of what you're doing, now people go, oh, it's mouth to mouth.

It's fine, I'll kiss him back to life. What are you doing? Steve, stop that. You see kiss it better to little kids. It doesn't mean anything. I'm going to kiss him for 20 minutes. If that doesn't work, I'm sticking the pipe off his ass. Are you sure you're a doctor?

I'm kissing you for 20 minutes and it all goes well I'll shove the pipe on his heart I do want Are you actually a doctor? You do wonder to what extent people were nervous to try it for fear of people going

What are you doing? I used to think about mouth to mouth a lot As a teenager It would crop up a lot In things like Baywatch Yeah I would be walking down the street

And come out of thinking I don't have to do mouth to mouth Have you learned how to do it It is something I keep thinking I should go to all those courses. I did CPR. There's actually, I did. There's a very good course on the British Heart Foundation website. The Reviver page teaches you how to do CPR.

And it takes about 15, less than 15 minutes. And it is worth it because I cycled from Swansea to loop boat with Lee Trundle to raise awareness for the Reviver page of the British Heart Foundation. I need to do this. Because I still use the pipe up the arse approach, which is just. Browned upon Yeah Tom coming

I've read about this in a 200 year old book I'm trying to save someone I'm yelling on Oxford Street As I'm getting out some tubing from my bag But yeah I do need to do that I genuinely need to do that So by 1745

This idea of mouth to mouth resuscitation Is spreading The Yorkshire born physician John Fothergill A Quaker and a friend of Benjamin Franklin delivered a lecture in London praising Tossack's work and arguing that this improvised technique should become a formal medical method

and by association, just over 200 years later, Lee Trundle and Ellis James are often a cycle ride. Again, doing their bit. It still took, despite all the, you know, in 1745, lots of talk of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, it still took another 20 years for the idea to catch on. And when it did, it was actually in the Netherlands

that it really took hold. In 1767, Amsterdam, a city defined by its canals and therefore the constant risk of drowning. They call it a blowback there, don't they, Chris? They call it a blowback? Because they're into smoking weed, that's a thing. Yeah, yeah. They're into smoking weed, that's a thing. Yeah, you're into drug-ud, old bastards.

Yeah, in 1767 in Amsterdam was founded the Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons, and the Society promoted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as a serious first- day technique. But also, the Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons in 1767 is also promoting rectal fumigation, bloodletting and various other treatments which have not aged well. Nevertheless, the Amsterdam model spread very quickly. Similar societies were founded in Hamburg, Venice, Vienna and Paris, and in the mid-1770s, a physician called Thomas Cogan returned to London from the Netherlands,

having studied medicine there, and he teamed up with another campaigning doctor, William Hors, who had been advocating mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in Britain since 1773. In the summer of 1774, they met with allies in a coffee house near St Paul's Cathedral and founded what would become the Royal Humane Society, originally called the Society for the Recovery of a Persons apparently drowned. Less catchy, I'm glad they rebadged it. The whole journey from Tossack's rescue of James Blair to a nationally recognised organisation took 40 years.

and almost at the exact moment that mouth-to-mouse resuscitation was being transformed and entered into the British consciousness, we also discovered oxygen. So between the 1770s and the 1780s, Carl Wilhelm Schieleh in Sweden and Joseph Priestley in England and Antoine Leveswer in France independently discovered the element we call oxygen, began to understand how it worked in the human body. Early researchers were really confused about the exchange of gases. I mean, imagine trying to wrap you had around this in the mid-1770s. So they could see that inhaled air contains about 21% oxygen

and exhaled air contains about 16%. And the differences exchanged for carbon dioxide. The figures were understood, but not really the theoretical basis of what was actually going on. In the 19th century, though, that's when we set about doing what everyone was doing in the 19th century, which was like replacing human effort with technology. Instead of relying on a first aid of blowing into someone's mouth,

engineers began designing breathing apparatus for the first time machines that could deliver clean air in dangerous environments. And the push came from free industries in particular, mining, firefighting and underwater exploration. The breakthrough came in 1878 when a British engineer called Henry Flois. Born in Marlborough, patented what he called a rebreather, which was a rubber mask, a breathing bag,

and a copper container of premixed oxygen and carbon dioxide. And this meant for the first time you could keep aware of breathing for around three hours underwater. And Foyce himself was an underwater diver and tested it himself in 1879. I would not want to be. That's mind-blowing, 1879, three hours underwater. That is just phenomenal. Wow. I wouldn't want to be one of the first guys testing diving gear in 1879.

I wonder if they knew about things like the bends. Oh, almost certainly not. No. Oh man. So that was AC79. The very next year the equipment was pressed into real world service by engineers working on the construction of the Severn Tunnel, the great railway link between South Wales and Southwest England,

which had suffered dangerous flooding. Soon after, it was adopted by mine's rescue teams. And then in 1904, the German firm Drager produced its own rebreather deployed in French Mine Rescue in 1906. It was so successful that Drager's designs quickly become the standard breathing apparatus across Europe and the United States. To this day, the German word for mines at rescueer is a dragger man.

Yeah, so the whole story runs from Gallen, a friend of the show, with his read, may have been snogging dead dears, to a Scottish doctor pinching a miner's nose in 1732, to a Dutch canal-side first-aid society, to a coffee house near St Paul's, to a copper canister of oxygen tested by an amateur diver, and finally to the sleek breathing apparatus, a firefighter carries today. That's incredible, isn't it? And along the road, there was many bumps, including people almost dead, having tobacco smoke pumped up their back sides on the banks of the Thames. The final indignity.

Do you think anyone was ever rescued from the Thames had the tobacco enema and thought, this is so embarrassing, I hope I don't survive. To finish today's episode, I'm going to tell you lovely boys, It's all about bone setting throughout history. So have either of you broken a bone or even dislocated a bone in your life? Yes. Where are you with that? Broke a foot when I was five, broke a finger when I was about 14, but nothing more major than that.

How do you do those two things? Brought my foot playing a game called Stampsies. Quite obvious what the game was. You say life is better with the iPad. This really does make it clear how much. So how does stamps these work? We had to stamp on each other's feet. My friend Tom stamped on my foot and broke the dreaded metatarsal about 25 years before

it was fashionable. Did you ever play a game, El, when someone would come up to you at school and go, do you collect stamps? And then you go, no. And they go, well, here's the first one for your collection. Then they stamp on your foot. Or if you said yes, they'd say, well, here's another one for your collection. There was basically no way of getting out of them stamping on your foot.

Yeah. It was that sort of thing. And then we were doing pylons on the road. pitch and a bigger boy fell on my hand and broke my finger. Ouch. Yeah, but other than I've never broken a leg or an arm and things significant. What about you, Chris?

Meta-tarsal. Around the same time, the Beckham did his. How? What happened? I was in my dad's factory doing work experience and someone rolled a forklift truck over my foot. No. That's a proper injury.

That's like a cartoon. Yeah, it was horrendous. Just briefly tell me what it's like to have a for-dict-drive-over-your-foot. How bad is that? My foot, I remember I took my shoe off, touched my foot, and it was just jelly. What? Yeah. So had you broken loads of bones?

No, just two. Just like my little toe and the bones beyond that. Yeah. Oh my goodness, me. Have you got flat toes now? No, just one dodgy toe. Like flippers? Have you?

Like a penguin? So did it come back to life your jelly foot? Yeah, yeah, it was fine. They didn't put a cast on it or anything like that. It just said there's nothing you can, you've just got to keep it elevated. It was also around, wasn't there Olympics on or something that summer? I remember sitting sitting around a lot, watching a lot of sport.

The cruel truth there is if you're working at a different factory, you'd have got some kind of payoff there. Because of your dad factory. A fortniff goes over your foot and it's like, well, that just happened. Was the guy fairly apologetic? Not apologetic enough, in my opinion. Yeah. I think it's a bit more apologetic.

I think it's one of those situations where you're like, oh, you don't want to incriminate yourself, even though he'd just rolled a fort lift over my foot. Yeah. Oh, God, the dreading match at a tamsal. The fact that Ellis and I have known you for years and at no point is it come up with a forklift truck drove over your foot and flattened your toes.

Turning your foot into jelly. What a detail. Yeah. Amazing. Well, I imagine when you had your breakages, you went to hospital. Yeah. And you went to the fracture clinic. They put it maybe in a cast, whatever they needed to do with that point,

to operate if that was the case. Is that way to what happened with you? Well, fun fact. My mother took me to the GP and the GP said, there's nothing wrong with him. Boys will be boys. And I continued to limp. And she took me to the GP again about a week later.

And he said, there's nothing wrong with him, Mrs. James. Boys will be boys. And you're mollycodding this boy. No. So she was like, okay. So left it another... That's awful. And left it in other few days and I was still limping. And then eventually she thought, oh, I don't know. GPs taking me very seriously. It took me to A&E.

And then they x-rayed me and said he's broken his foot. But it's an old break, Mrs. James. My mother then was questioned and had to say, no, I've taken it to the GP twice, but I've been accused of Molly Condling him. Wow. But I wasn't put in a cast. I was... It's all I remember about is I got a transformer out of it.

I do you. Okay. Yeah, but I wasn't, there was no cast. And I remember walking up and down the hall and my mother and my grandmother assessing my gate and saying he's definitely limping. Yeah. And he said, I also didn't want to incriminate my friend Tom and I didn't want to let on that I'd been playing a game called Stampsys.

So for the second time in this episode, I was extremely brave. Well, I mean, not the ideal outcome for your mum. That sounds very stressful. but, you know, it could have been worse because this could have been happening thousands of the years ago because forever humans have been breaking bones. No great surprise there.

It's just something that we've always done. And it'd be easy to think, though, that kind of we should be appreciative of the fact that we live in modern times. Now, if you broke a bone in the past, it was much harder, but it's remarkable, as with your section L, how early sort of relatively modern practices come in

I'm going to start by telling you about this. There's ancient Egyptian writing, notably the Ebers Papyrus, okay, which deals with medical procedures detailing techniques for treating broken bones. And throughout ancient and classical civilization, physicians, they're already using splints and bandages and casts and possibly even emergency amputation all to heal their patient of injury. In fact, this just blew my mind. There are actual examples of ancient.

Egyptian splints that have been discovered in tombs in 1903 when a pair of mummies from 3,000 BC were found by British archaeologists and it's noted they have broken bones and their limbs are wrapped in splints using bark, grass and linen to allow them to heal properly. It's amazing, isn't it? Wow. The Egyptians make things at last. That's what I find. That's my take-home.

The Egyptians consistently is that that splint is good for 5,000 years. Do you reckon they were writing on casts like kids do? Three thousand years ago, but in hieroglyphics? Rude hieroglyphics. I really hope so. So they examine these mummies. They notice that, as I say, their limbs broken. They've been wrapped in splints.

And similar techniques are then seen elsewhere in ancient India as well, also documented from 900 BC. But this time, they are using bamboo in place of tree bark. So tree bark in ancient Egypt, bamboo in India. Any guesses why this is real progress? Why is bamboo real progress? Is it straighter? Well, actually, it's the opposite.

It's because it's more flexible. So it allows for more rapid healing, more rapid healing process to take place. So we can see how these advancements are sort of stepping forward very quickly through time. They're using different materials. And it wasn't just splints either. Ancient civilizations also use casts to heal broken bones.

The Romans used cornstarch, which stiffened linen bandages. So those are the people that might have got at Seindale. The early casts were in ancient Rome, while the Greeks used bees, watch and resin to a similar end. And by the 9th century AD, Arab doctors were using crushed seashells, egg whites to make a lime to form in effect, the earliest form of plaster cast. So that's in the 9th century AD humans are using plaster casts.

Isn't that amazing? The Times, I read three or four of these articles yesterday. in the Times, I love these articles where they will find a body of someone who died 2,000 years ago and they'll realize that they had links to Scandinavia or something,

way earlier than they'd assumed and all this kind of stuff. And then through DNA and modern scientific techniques, they'll be able to tell an awful lot about the person's diet and how old they were and whether they were nomadic

from just tiny little samples of bone. And quite often, the person will have, will have had broken bones and they can tell, you know, he or she will have broken an arm when they were 14 or whatever and recovered from it. It must be a red, broken up our bone

2,000 years ago, must be awful, the lack of pain relief. I went to the National Museum to look at the dinosaurs of my kids, and there's an iguanadon with a broken hip. Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, I found myself feeling sorry for a dinosaur because he's broken his hip 65 million years ago. I mean, it's bad.

You're right, like 30,000 years ago, breaking your leg as a human. But a dinosaur, your options are very limited. No, not even a paracetamol. Yeah, that's like a nightmare time to have a broken leg as well, with T-Rexes and all those sort of things. Oh, yeah, bloody hell. Well, they have these early techniques. These are the early casts.

They're using bamboo for splints and all sort of stuff. But kind of remarkably, not much changes for a long time. They're making these gradual improvements. But these techniques are essentially used. right up until the invention of medical plaster in Harlem Military Hospital, which is in 1851. So that's the amount of time that these techniques are basically used in some form and other. So 1851, there's a Dutchman called Antonius Mataisen. And his invention of medical plaster is kind of crucial change, because the previous starch method

takes a day to stiffen. His new plaster, which is what we use today, takes a matter of minutes. So previously, you would break your arm. you then have to remain there for a lot, like 24 hours, 48 hours for this thing to harden around your arm. This meant that in a matter of minutes you can have a car, so which, of course, with a huge impact on the treatment of people in war and kind of after battles. And it was really, it was military medicine that drives techniques forward at a greater pace. Military medicine has a huge impact on the treatment of more complex internal fractures as well,

including the installation of metal plates to bridge very serious injuries. The most well known of these, and celebrated, of these surgical plates, is attached to a bone known as the Van Hem Humerus. Now, have you heard of this? This is remarkable. The upper arm. Yes, exactly. Are you aware of this particular bone? I know where the humerus is. Oh, no, but the Van Hem Humerus. Have you heard of this particular find? Well, this bone, okay, it's found during excavations at Van Hem Abbey, which is in Sweden in 1928.

It's a bone which is medieval, and it shows the successful application of a thin copper piece. plate to a fracture by physicians. So in medieval Sweden, under the skin, they have wrapped this broken bone in copper and resealed the wound and the metal is now part of the arm to provide structure and strength to the broken arm. It's also observed, it's amazing, it's observed that the arm has grown since it was operated on, which shows that the patient lived for several years after this surgery as well. And it was most likely surgery, this really captures how much more brutal times were in the past. It's most likely this surgery followed battle because the injury appears to be caused by severe trauma to the upper arm, either by a sword or a heavy axe.

So not quite enough to sever the arm, but enough to cause major damage to the bone. It's a real moment I'm really glad I live today. You know you have those moments on this show. All the time. So you've had severe axe wound and now you're in a field in medieval Britain and someone's having to put copper into your arm and hoping for the best, essentially. But the surgery is incredible. And you're actually finding yourself glad that no one's trying to blow smoke up your ass. Thinking that's not happening for another 800 years or so. Exactly.

But the surgery, to be fair, is incredible. The physicians, they use copper for the plate. The reason being copper was widely manufactured in Sweden at the time. It was plentiful, but also because it could be manipulated by the smithy. So it was a metal that was used and shaped. And also, and it was likely to be chosen because of this. and I find this remarkable as well, the long-observed healing properties of copper.

Yeah, it has antibacterial properties, isn't it? Exactly. Copper does have natural antimicrobial properties. Most forms of bacteria, fungi, germs, all eliminated within hours of contact. And this wasn't a scientific knowledge that they possessed, but this was something that they had observed, you know, germ theory was centuries away,

but they were aware that it had some kind of healing quality, and that would have been the reason they'd chosen this metal. I love how these ancient, or not ancient, but at least medieval and ancient in many cases, beliefs are then backed up by science today. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, I love it. So the Van Hem Humerus has been dated to around 1260 AD, maybe to the mid-16th century, around 1527 AD as a cut off. And interestingly, it forms part of a body of material evidence that shows the extent to which medieval Sweden, well, in medieval Sweden, sorry, medicine was present. practice through the Cistercian Church. So that's in Abbees and in the presence of monks. So Varnham Abbey

was a Cistercian foundation. The evidence found includes hygienic devices, instruments for treating minor ailments, vessels for medicines and elixes and so forth. It's worth saying that unfortunately this has to be filed a little bit under speculation since religious institutions like Varnham Abbey also allowed members of the wider community to be buried within the ground. So it's basically hard to know whether the people buried in the ground were treated at the abbey or they were simply there because that's where people were buried, but it's likely they were. And in fact, despite the Varnham Abbey humourous and its plate, in general, mediturgical activity doesn't really bring up lots of evidence. In Britain, for example, there are just a few archaeological examples of amputations

taking place within monastic infirmaries and nothing even close to the copper plate. And it's the same in Ireland, means that although this is kind of an amazing find, this bone, the humourous is extremely unusual as a source for understanding medieval surgical practice. What's also interesting is that if we take the Nordic sagas as a reference point, they actually sort of conform less to the idea of copper plates being fixed to fractures and more to the idea of bone setting. So they use willow bark as part of a splint, the relocation and dislocation of joints and bloodletting, as you mentioned earlier, Chris, and so on. I think if I was ill and I got to the doctor and they suggested bloodletting, I think I'm probably going to try and find a different option. It doesn't feel like

the answer I'm looking for. The old second opinion, please. Exactly. Can we try a dock leaf or something like that? But there is one thing we can be more sure of. And I'll sort of close on this point. And this is interesting, which is about who performed the surgeries back then, Okay, because it wouldn't have been the monks themselves. The reason for this was that the fourth Lateran council, which has held in 1215, prohibited clergy from performing surgical procedures involving bloodshed. Therefore, a secular figure would be brought in from the wider community, referred to as the barber surgeon.

It's another thing I don't want to hear. I don't need to be called it. This is just a guy from the community who's the barber surgeon. The monks, they would cut my fringe by a... all means. Exactly. Yeah. Give me a short back of side, but do not.

Amputate my leg. The monks, okay, they would pray for the patient and the physician, and then bless them with sacrament, all that sort of stuff, assist with their religious health, which is considered vital in the medieval world. But then the monks would step back, allowing the professional, in averted commas, to do the actual surgery. And then once the surgery was complete, the monks would then step in again with their standard medical technology of herbs, soups, Lucasade, all that sort of stuff.

Incidentally, I'm quite annoyed if I'm a surgeon and they're looking to sort of split responsibility on this going, didn't we all do well? No, no, no. Just to be clear, I'm the one that did the stuff that mattered. I think my suit made a difference. And by way of thanks, healed patients or families might leave votives, which were carved representations of the healed arm, hand or or whatever it might be at sacred sites or at churches to give thanks for their treatment. So these have been found. There have been little feet, little arms, all these sort of things that would have been left by the families to say thank you for the surgery that was done and the prayers given by the

monks. So that is broken bones throughout history. And once again, what I find remarkable, as with your stuff, is just quite how early these techniques come in and how long they remain kind of used. even today, so many of them still are abound. It's a remarkable thing. So there you are. That's broken bones to complete our set.

Wow. Well, well done. Traumatic. God I'm got some Swedish guy shoving a lot of copper into my arm. Well, that's it. Don't forget. If you want to email the show, email hello at oh what a time.com. Otherwise, we'll see you next week.

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