The Surgery
This not only deals with battle wounds, sometimes very graphically, but the other ailments and medical problems of the age as well, including teeth pulling, amputation, poultices and simple operations which are dealt with by the unsympathetic surgeon.
If you think you have the stomach for it; visit the surgery.
It is very difficult for people in the 21st Century to fully comprehend the rudimentary state of medicine and healing of a thousand years ago. Steeped in ancient superstition, people then believed that ill-health had more to do with God (or Gods) and worship than any other factor. In an age where the existence of germs was unknown and the circulation of the blood as yet undiscovered, many so-called ‘cures’ and remedies belonged to the world of quackery, old wives’ tales and a gullible populace.
“Know ye of the Wise Woman?” was no doubt a frequently asked question of the medieval era. It must have been a period of paradise for charlatans, and although the educated men of Anglo-Saxon society – the monks – were more often than not the sole custodians of medical knowledge, such as it was, Christian belief was also imbued with more than its fair share of questionable doctrine and odd beliefs.
The Anglo-Saxon word for ‘doctor’ was ‘Lach’, from whence derives the word ‘leech’; hence the common title of collections of remedies – ‘A Booke of Leechdoms’. That universal panacea for all ills – the humble leech – so beloved of the Middle Ages and ‘Blackadder’ alike, takes its name from this early word rather than the other way round. There are those, however, who, quite cruelly suggest that this epithet, as applied to modern private practitioners of the art, is not entirely inappropriate! Many early lachs were monks.
The Saxons’ heathen counterparts – the Vikings – would have drawn similar knowledge from a variety of sources: their own inherited wisdom; methods picked up during their journeys (they were better travelled); first hand experiences, including treatments learnt from Christians; and of course, the ubiquitous ‘wise woman’.
Gradually, cures, both efficacious and not, would be drawn into books of ‘leechdoms’, so we can see remedies for headaches, stomach ache, haemorrhoids and constipation amongst many other varied recipes.
Much of the work of the ‘Lach’, however, would be concerned with external injuries, such as battle wounds. His equipment would include a variety of tools, not dissimilar to those of today. Probes and retractors, several different sizes of sharp knife – the forerunners of the modern scalpel – and a bone saw were all in evidence.
Perhaps the greatest difference between then and now is the lack of anything approximating an anaesthetic. Consequently, victims, sorry – patients – would need to be held down, often with ropes, whilst the ‘surgeon’ practiced his art. Gashes, arrow wounds and amputations would all be performed in this way, without the assistance of even the simplest form of anesthetic, such as ether or chloroform. The screams emanating from the lach’s ‘surgery’ must have sounded absolutely horrendous. Perhaps the patient was given something to clench between his teeth, but more often than not, mercifully, he probably passed out. One wonders just what proportion of battle-injured warriors managed to survive such primitive ministrations.
Let us follow the possible treatment of a typical arrow wound:
1) The lach first extracts the offending missile – thankfully an unbarbed tip. [see later for details concerning barbed arrows]
2) He probes the wound to see if any shards of wood have lodged themselves in the wound – if they have he will have to remove them, almost certainly by making the wound larger with one of his many sharp knives, and then extracting the offending sliver with pincers.
3) Once this procedure was complete. Including amputation, the wound was ready to be sealed. As today, for gashes, arrow wounds and the like, stitching was an obvious method. A surgeon’s assistant would then hold the hapless patient’s flesh together using some flat tongs / pincers, whilst the lach made a series of holes with a sharp probe. As the stitching needles were made of bone, they were not sharp enough to make the holes and were used to carry the linen thread, or, if the patient was rich enough, silken.
4) The alternative to stitching was cauterisation with red-hot irons, and to this end the ‘surgery’ was equipped with several shapes and sizes of cauterising tools, including one that could be inserted up the nose through a hollow sleeve, to cure nosebleeds by searing the blood vessels therein. During the cauterising of our hypothetical patient’s arrow wound, three tools would be necessary. i] small circular to be inserted at point of entry ii] large circular to seal point of exit, and iii] long to seal the enlarging knife cut. All without anesthetic! Although the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings did not understand the existence of germs, they somehow had discovered that a cauterised wound did not become any worse.
5) All that remained now was for the ‘lucky’ survivor to pay for his treatment. Needless to say, there was no NHS, so everyone had to pay. Those who could not afford to pay would doubtless have to make recompense in produce or service, although it is questionable just how much use in this latter capacity, a man with a crippled arm or leg might be! After such primeval treatment, many patients may not have been able to work as they had previously, as it is doubtful whether internal ligaments, tendons, veins etc., would have survived. Many arms and legs would have been useless after such ‘surgery’.
A Viking warrior injured on the battlefield could look forward to excruciating pain under the ‘surgeon’s’ knife, whereas one who died fighting with his sword in his hand could anticipate an eternity in Valhall where he would fight or hunt all day and feast and drink all night.
Arrow wounds: Arrows designed as anti personnel missiles, as opposed to the armour-piercing bodkin type, were often cruelly barbed, making it virtually impossible to extract without irreparably damaging the muscle and tissues even further. The only solution was to snap off the fletched end and drive the remainder of the shaft through to the other side. Should the shaft unfortunately be lodged in the shoulder, a fellow warrior of the unfortunate victim might come to his assistance, by using some heavy implement to shatter his friend’s scapula (shoulder blade) thus effecting exit of the offending arrowhead. And the warriors who survived were supposed to be the lucky ones!
All too often, we are treated to images of heroes of the large and small screen dismissing arrow wounds in the shoulder as ‘mere flesh wounds’ and ‘minor injuries’. Dark-age warfare was a pretty horrible affair and any attempt to glorify it by Hollywood should be taken with a pinch of salt.
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