These Grisly 19th-Century Medical Drawings Will Horrify You

While modern-day surgery carries risks, it's nothing compared to the agony of going under the knife before the advent of anesthesia in 1846, when John Collins Warren performed the first successful operation using ether gas as an anesthetic at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Pre-anesthesia, surgery was a last resort, “a humiliating spectacle of the futility of science,” as Scottish anatomist and surgeon John Hunter said in 1750. Not exactly what you want to hear from your doctor.

If it was challenging to be a health care professional before anesthesia, it was doubly bad to be a patient. Novelist Fanny Burney's description of her 1811 mastectomy -- without any anesthesia -- is as gripping and horrifying as a battle scene. (Even worse, it's not clear that her cancer diagnosis was accurate.)

When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast -- cutting through veins -- arteries -- flesh -- nerves -- I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision -- and I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still? So excruciating was the agony.

Now Crucial Interventions, a book about the evolution of surgery, captures a compilation of gorgeously gruesome surgery illustrations and technical drawings from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, each guaranteed to make you thankful you're a contemporary human.

WARNING: The illustrations below contain graphic content.