Here’s how to do it.
Sam Pepys had a stone he size of a tennis ball removed from his bladder by Thomas Hollier of St. Thomas’s and Bart’s on March 26, 1658.
Acetylizing is not always easy, and it can go awry. Could end up with cholesterol instead. Hence the rhymes, sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells”. We used to sing this in organic chemistry lab in the mid 70’s, when the mood was Christmassy. 
Take an acetate,
Condense it with a mate
Pretty soon you have
Acetoacetate.
Let 'em have a ball
You get geraniol,
Add another isoprene
And you’ve got farnesol.
Farnesol, farnesol, good old farnesol,
First it goes to squalene, then you get cholesterol.
Farnesol, farnesol, good old farnesol,
First it goes to squalene, then you get cholesterol.
Now squalene makes a roll,
Becomes lanosterol
The extra methyls do
Come off as CO2;
Then comes zymosterol,
And then desmosterol
If you don’t take Triparanol
You get cholesterol.
Repeat chorus
Not just that. The bacteria that naturally produced antibiotics produced very little of it. They had to take years to select a strain that would produce absurdly high quantity of it for it to be of any use. It was a massive endeavor. So your bread mold would be ineffective, even if you chanced on the right strain.
I remember an example showing that pre-modern doctors in fact knew something. It’s related to the autopsy of the remains of a 15th century famous person body to determine the causes of death.
IIRC (not sure I’ll remember everything right), they found evidences of a massive intestine worms infestation (so bad that worms were probably getting out of her mouth too), of consumption of a fern, and of the presence of a toxic compound. It is apparently known that this particular fern was used effectively in conjunction with the compound to treat intestinal worms (some alcaloïde in the fern would paralyze the worms, and the compound was used to then “flush” them out). The toxic compound was however apparently used in this case in doses massively higher than was the norm, hence the death was ruled as being probably a poisoning by her own physician. Which means that said physician :
-knew an effective treatment for this ailment
-knew that one of the elements of this treatment was toxic and at what dose (of course, I guess it’s possible he was in fact clueless and thought : “well, it works with X ounces of it, probably will be even better if I try with twenty times more of it”).
Personally, if I was somehow sent back to an earlier era and seen by a physician (or a traditional healer) for some disease, I would probably pay attention to his advice, after asking him what exactly he was prescribing me, why and what it was supposed to do. If it wasn’t something that is known bullshit (bleeding me, giving me mummy powder, regulating my humors) but rather something along the lines of a plant potion intended to, say, reduce an inflammation, I would give it a try, since I believe that they knew at least some things that could be sometimes useful.
When I think of it, Ambroise Pare, a 16th century surgeon who came up with several significant improvements in his field, and is particularly well known wrt the treatment of battle wounds (sewing up blood vessels, discarding cauterization) used turpentine on said wounds. Which means again that its antiseptic properties were known at the time (even if they obviously didn’t know that it was an antiseptic).
I suspect that physicians and doctors of past ages knew more than they’re generally credited for.
Wow! I wonder what the survival rate on that surgery was? I’m not a doctor (and never had a bladder stone) but I guess while having a bladder stone like that is very unpleastant and painful, it wouldn’t be lethal.
I am guessing there is a lot of survivor bias in these descriptions, in the many cases where the patient died during the surgery or afterward from infection, it was simply blamed on fate. Where as if they survived and got better, the doctor would claim success even if their intervention had nothing to do with it.
When i wrote that, i was envisioning our Doctor member going back in time.
I figured he would not have too much of a terrible time isolating the things he needed.
If the stone completely blocks the flow of urine yes, it could potentially be lethal.
No running water. No functional sewage system. Takes an effort to boil water. Good luck with that.
[QUOTE=Broomstick]
Folks, you certainly CAN do surgery without anesthesia. I don’t know where you get this notion that no one removed anything from a human body before anesthesia. Lots of surgeons did lots of surgery before anesthesia.
It sucked if you were the patient, of course, and there would be several people holding you down so you did thrash too much, and surgeons got used to ignoring the screaming and got the job done as quickly as possible. But surgery did occur back in the old days. It helped often enough that desperate people continued to undergo it when necessary.
[/QUOTE]
Opium and cannabis have been used as painkillers for centuries.
From bob++‘s quote about Pepys’ bladder surgery:
I can understand not stitching the outer incision, but what about the bladder itself? It seems to me that, if you don’t close that up somehow (how? I dunno) then any further urine accumulation would just leak out into the abdominal cavity, which seems like it’d have to have bad effects. And I don’t think there’s any way to stop the kidneys from producing urine for long enough to let a three-inch incision heal.
Incidentally, the original version of the Hippocratic Oath specifically prohibited “cutting for stone”. Such surgeries were known, but they were so risky that it was considered impossible for it to be an ethical option. At the same time, though, stones could cause so much pain that a patient might be willing to brave the risks, hence the need for the injunction in the first place.
As was alcohol. Alcohol also sterilises.
When I was in college, and living with relatives who kept small livestock, I owned a 19th Century Materia Medica. It was quite useful, as it predated (prescription) antibiotics. I use some of the techniques from time to time to this day
It was used as a topical medication to treat or prevent infections. You used to be able to buy carbolated Vaseline and similar preparations for application to wounds and abrasions. Phenol was also used similarly.