The bloodstains show you’re a senior doctor

December 4, 2022 7:00 AM

Play as an early 19th century surgeon in a historically accurate and gruesome interactive text game (Twine) by The Old Operating Theatre Museum’ web volunteer Charlotte Regan.
posted by dorothyisunderwood (9 comments total)

Well, my patient survived and I was ready to be proud of myself before I learned that the game randomly picks the number of days the patient has to await treatment - mine was treated the very next day so my surgeon's decisions played less of a role.

All in all, pretty great game.
posted by M. at 8:05 AM on December 4, 2022

Women are ONLY operated on on Fridays? Welp, guess she gonna die.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 9:58 AM on December 4, 2022

I managed not to kill my patient, although she had to wait three days for the operation. Good intro to the, er, joys of early nineteenth-century surgery.
posted by thomas j wise at 10:00 AM on December 4, 2022

…she had to wait three days for the operation. Good intro to the, er, joys of early nineteenth-century surgery.

I saw that as E.R.; given the overwhelmed state of many emergency rooms these days, that’s not an inaccurate description of wait times.

Women are ONLY operated on on Fridays? Welp, guess she gonna die.

Given the state of surgery in those days (An operation with 300% mortality?!), that delay might have saved more than a few lives, at least those who recuperated to the point surgery was no longer felt to be needed.
posted by TedW at 11:55 AM on December 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

You wash your hands. You’ve still got three more operations today, so you wipe your hands on your apron. You’ll wash them once you’ve finished with the final patient.

Whelp. Best to be the first case of the day, I guess. (As true now as then, although hopefully for different reasons!)

I did notice that one of the options was "spend the morning dissecting corpses" and was like "NOPE!"
posted by basalganglia at 12:06 PM on December 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

The rare Twine game in which speedrunning is the only possible successful strat.

Women are ONLY operated on on Fridays? Welp, guess she gonna die.

As a charity patient, poor Elizabeth had to take what she could get. I don't know why exactly they would have had it that way, but probably it involved "modesty" somehow. A luckier woman -- although "luck" is a strong word -- was the novelist Fanny Burney, who survived to write about her operation for breast cancer. But then, she was gentry and got to suffer in private.* Her doctors and surgeons decided to give her only two hours' notice of the surgery, presumably to reduce her anxiety, and it might have worked if they hadn't told her they were going to do that.

As bad as medical sexism was and is, men were not having a good time in the andrology department, such as it was. Kidney stone removal was so horrible that it used to be against the Hippocratic Oath. Pre-modern medicine is never going to stop being a wellspring of horror for me.

If you're ever in New Orleans in the French Quarter, I highly recommend the Pharmacy Museum, which fills an antebellum apothecary shop over two floors. The collection has a lot of drugs, as you would expect, but also medical paraphernalia that will make you as woozy as walking through that hot old building with a mask on (as I did).

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* Doctors made house calls up to the early 1980s. I guess it's one of the first things that the medical administration companies got rid of.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:14 PM on December 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

Oh, I've been to this museum! It's wonderful! And the guide gave me a faux amputation on that same small table you see in the photo of the operating theater. The example in this game is similar to the one we were given on the tour, right down to getting hit by a cart in the narrow streets of Southwark below. The higher the amputation, the lower the chance of survival, so amputations below the knee had a much higher rate of survival than above. (My patient survived!)

One leading strategy for amputation involved a kind of a spiral cutting motion. The surgeon would wrap their arm, razor-sharp knife in hand, around your limb, and then quickly unspiral their arm, slicing everything to the bone in a single clean cut. It's incredibly quick. A dresser would be standing by with a wooden box, about the size new tall boots would come in, and it'd be filled with sawdust. A good dresser could leave the box on the floor and kick it to the exact spot a patient's falling limb would land, without ever letting go of the patient. (The poet John Keats was a dresser and surgical assistant as a very young man in his teens.)

The operating theater itself is built on a platform, a false floor. Between the platform surface and the real floor, they would stuff sawdust to catch the drippings, and they'd have to clear it out periodically and repack the space with fresh sawdust. Even so, after busy days of surgeries, sometimes the blood would drip down the ceiling of the chapel below, and parishioners who had not known what was going on upstairs would think of it as a divine miracle. The clergy would not correct them.

Anyway, enlightenment era medical history is my jam and I especially enjoyed this, dorothyisunderwood. Great post. Thanks!
posted by mochapickle at 3:54 PM on December 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

After six or seven strokes the leg comes off.
Survived the surgery but not the infection. : /
posted by Glinn at 4:03 PM on December 4, 2022

My patient survived even though she had to wait five days for surgery, but I deeply regret playing through this right before lunch...
posted by terretu at 4:06 AM on December 5, 2022