Before anesthesia, people would have to bite on belts and use alcohol to help with the pain. Surgeries without anesthesia were leading to infections and death. There was a surgery performed on Fanny Burney in 1811 for her mastectomy. Before the surgery, she took a shot of whiskey to dim the pain. She said she was screaming the whole surgery, and she fainted a couple of times throughout the surgery. Fainting was better than staying awake during the excruciating pain Burney endured. Burney’s surgery took place before common anesthetics were used.

An anesthesiologist Hans Sviggum told us that before anesthesia was invented you couldn’t do nearly as many surgeries as we can now because of all of the new inventions. Surgeons would give them alcohol and have the patients bite on a stick, to ease the pain. Surgeons couldn’t put the patients to sleep so they would use numbing agents. In other words, undergoing surgery was very painful back then due to the lack of medication to relieve pain.