Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery
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YEAR: 2009 | LENGTH: 5 parts (60 minutes each) | SOURCE: BBC
description:
Documentary series looking at the brutal, bloody and dangerous history of surgery.
episodes:
01. Into the Brain
Documentary series looking at the brutal, bloody and dangerous history of surgery begins with the area of the body where it has been most frightening – the brain.
Just over 100 years ago, cutting into the brain was a terrifying prospect for both patient and surgeon. They could expect the result to be the surgeon bloodied and defeated, and the patient dead. From freak accidents involving crowbars through the skull to notorious lobotomies with icepicks, this programme reveals how, through mishap and misadventure, brain surgery has become the life-saving discipline it is today.
02. Bleeding Hearts
Series about the brutal, bloody and dangerous history of surgery continues with a look at the development of heart surgery, which produced some extremely reckless experiments.
With a family history of heart problems, presenter Michael Mosley takes a personal interest in these pioneers, who teetered on the scalpel-edge between saviour and executioner. Michael has a go at heart surgery, meets a man with no heartbeat and witnesses an operation where the patient is cooled until their brain stops and has all of their blood sucked out.
03. Spare Parts
Documentary series about the brutal, bloody and dangerous history of surgery continues with a look at the development of transplant surgery, from a Nazi sympathiser to the latest miraculous life- and limb-saving operations.
These days, transplant surgery saves thousands of lives every year and almost everything, from heart to eyes, can be replaced. But in the beginning, transplants killed rather than cured, because surgeons didn’t understand that they were taking on one of the most efficient killing systems we know of – the human immune system.
04. Fixing Faces
Documentary series about the brutal, bloody and dangerous history of surgery continues with a look at the development of plastic surgery.
Thought of as a modern phenomenon, it actually started over 400 years ago with a spate of botched nose jobs. Since then, surgeons have been entranced with the idea that not only could they fix the body, but could even fix our sense of self-esteem.
Presenter Michael Mosley undergoes both 16th-century bondage and 21st-century botox in his journey of discovery.
05. Bloody Beginnings
Documentary series about the brutal, bloody and dangerous history of surgery looks at how surgery dragged itself kicking and screaming out of the dark ages, transforming itself from butchery into a science.
Presenter Michael Mosley finds out how the early days of surgery were dark and barbaric, when the surgeon’s knife was more likely to kill you than save you, and invasive medicine generally meant being bloodlet by leeches to within an inch of your life.
SIMILAR TITLES:
Trust Me I’m a Doctor
The Brain, a Secret History
Medical Mavericks
How to Avoid Mistakes in Surgery
Mend Me: A Horizon Guide to Transplants
The Placebo Experiment: Can My Brain Cure My Body?
Medical Mavericks
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YEAR: 2007 | LENGTH: 4 parts (50 minutes each) | SOURCE: BBCdescription:
An exploration of the ways in which pioneering doctors laid the foundations of modern medicine by experimenting on themselves.episodes:
01. Anaesthesia
Series telling the incredible stories of the guinea-pig doctors who transformed medicine. Presenter Dr Michael Mosley explores the curious and sometimes fatal ways in which pioneering doctors laid thefoundations of modern medicine by experimenting on themselves.
In this first episode, Dr Mosley charts the development of pain-free surgery. He starts with the 18th century chemist Humphrey Davy, who inhaled up to 50 pints of laughing gas a day and yet missed its true significance. Conman-turned-dentist Dr William Morton slept with a skeleton by night and experimented with ether by day, 19th century Scottish national hero James Young Simpson’s reckless enthusiasm for chloroform led to numerous deaths and Sigmund Freud’s experiments with cocaine transformed anaesthetics.
Mosley also undergoes some of the historical experiments himself and meets researchers who are continuing the tradition of self-experimentation today.
02. Discovering Vaccines
Dr Michael Mosley explores the ways in which pioneering doctors laid the foundations of modern medicine by experimenting on themselves.
Mosley explores the unbelievable ways in which doctors learnt to harness the immune system by deliberately exposing themselves to incurable diseases like rabies, typhoid and polio. He meets the team of Nottingham doctors who are infecting themselves with hookworms to see if they can shut down the immune system in order to cope with allergies like hayfever and asthma.
The programme includes the story of living self-experimenter Dr Hilary Koprowski, who mixed up a potion of ground-up rats’ brains in the 1950s and drank it in his efforts to develop an oral polio vaccine. Mosley charts the terrible consequences of releasing an unproven vaccine too early, which happened in the race to control polio in the 1930s and the 1950s. One of the contributors describes the 1950s polio trial which involved millions of children as ‘the worst man-made biological disaster in American history’.
03. Diet and Disease
In the third episode of Medical Mavericks, Michael Mosley charts the extraordinary lengths doctors have gone to to uncover the connections between what we eat and what we die from.
It starts in the 18th century with 28 year-old Dr William Stark. Stark is a little-known hero of nutrition and the first doctor to systematically record the effect of different foods on his health. At the time food was seen simply as a form of fuel, it didn’t really matter what you ate. To disprove this, Stark decided to live on nothing but bread and water, then slowly add new foods one at a time. He continued this punishing dietary experiment for nine long months. Tragically, just before adding fruit to his diet, he succumbed to scurvy. Stark died because he didn’t know about vitamins and was unable to make the connection between his worsening health and the food he had been consuming. In fact, much of what we know today about which foods contain nutrients essential to our health is knowledge slowly and painfully acquired by self-experimenters.
Men like Dr Joseph Goldberger who, through eating a dying patient’s excrement, found the true cause of a dreadful epidemic and changed forever what goes into our food, or like Dr Victor Herbert who proved the health benefits of folic acid by living on thrice-boiled hamburgers, marshmallows and jelly, a diet that almost killed him.
In the programme Michael Mosley also repeats the experiment of Dr Hugh Sinclair, who lived on nothing but seal meat and fish oil for six months to demonstrate its effect on his blood.
Finally, Michael meets Dave who practises Calorie Restriction, a lifelong self-experiment with the goal of extending his lifespan by 50 years. Could diet really hold the secret of a life without the diseases of aging?
04. Beating Infection
Dr Michael Mosley explores the ways in which pioneering doctors laid the foundations of modern medicine by experimenting on themselves. He looks at how doctors came to understand infectious diseases bydeliberately infecting themselves with conditions like syphilis, yellow fever and cholera.
18th century surgeon John Hunter is thought to have stabbed himself in the groin with the pus of a syphilis patient to prove his theory that syphilis and gonorrhoea were different stages of the same disease. Dr Jesse Lazear demonstrated that mosquitoes spread yellow fever by allowing himself to be bitten by mosquitoes that had been feeding on dying yellow fever patients.
The programme brings us up to the present day with Dr Barry Marshall who proved through a course of painful self-experiments that a bacteria, not stress, causes ulcers as was commonly thought. Presenter Michael Mosley carries out his own self-experiment by allowing himself to be bitten by hundreds of mosquitoes at the London School of Tropical Medicine to find out which areas of the body, the disease carrying insects are most attracted to.SIMILAR TITLES:
Should I Eat Meat?
Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery
A User’s Guide to Cheating Death
BBC Four - Medical Mavericks
An exploration of how pioneering doctors laid the foundations of modern medicineBBC
This entry was edited (4 years ago)
