Operating with bare hands, dressed in his street clothes, he had taken those first steps that every training surgeon must take-gripping the handle of a scalpel and making the first, irrevocable cut into live human flesh. For the surgeon training in the early 1840s, these first surgical milestones were performed on a person who would recoil in terror and horror, flinch, pull away, shake-and scream and scream and scream.
The Chloroformist
