Amputation of the Breast

Abstract

Today we take for granted the blessing of anaesthesia and it is almost impossible for us to imagine the agonies that surgical patients underwent in the past. This description of a mastectomy, performed in 1720 by Lorenz Heister, Professor of Surgery and Anatomy in Altdorf in the republic of Nurnberg, (now part of Germany), gives a vivid idea of major surgery in those days. In this much shortened abstract from his lengthy report, which appears in the 1775 English edition of his textbook entitled ‘Medical, Chirurgical and Anatomical cases and Observations’ he discusses the preoperative preparation, the mastectomy itself, performed as quickly as possible and the tedious postoperative dressings of the inevitably suppurating wound;-