controlled experiment, Hunter concluded that all the secluded soldiers
healed without incident, despite not receiving what was considered
standard surgical exploration. The folly of aggressive care was revealed by
a side-to-side comparison of two treatment arms, made possible by the
high volumes of casualties among the belligerents.
There can be little doubt that Hunter’s experience with battlefield
medicine was exhausting and exhilarating and, at the same time, very
educational. The sheer volume of trauma cases honed his skills and
provided further insights in treating wounds and how to think about
infection. He stayed on the island for over one year, and then spent time in
Portugal before returning home. He arrived back in London in 1763, just
as Giovanni Morgagni’s book De Sedibus was gaining notoriety, eventually
being translated into English in 1769. An awe-inspiring book, De Sedibus,
for the first time, connected symptoms with diseased organs, and was the
foundation for modern pathology and medicine. Hunter’s inquisitive
nature, scientific programming, and the newly enlightened way of thinking
about the human body was a serendipitous amalgamation that made basic
surgical treatment, for the first time, a possibility.
Or was it? Hadn’t primitive surgery been attempted in the ancient
empires of India, Persia, Egypt, and Assyria? Although scholars in those
early empires had misinformed ideas about the function of the human
body, how was it that they had the ability to perform painful surgery on
primeval peoples? The answer is opium.
Opium is an ancient substance from the poppy, a flowering plant native
to the eastern Mediterranean that was cultivated throughout the Middle
East and India. Ancient Greek and Egyptian medical texts mention the use
of opium, and wherever early surgery was performed, its cultivation is
known. The poppy flower’s migration across empires, and its latex product
(containing the opiate alkaloids morphine and codeine), has impacted
trading and shipping, the modernization of medicine, and the spread of
religion. Whereas the incense, spice, and silk trade routes had largely been
based on land or sea routes close to the shore, the Age of Discovery led to
worldwide ocean voyages and the international trading of tea, tobacco,
sugar, cotton, and drugs.
The Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company
pioneered intercontinental trade in the 17th century, specializing in the
spice and tea trade in their first century of business. The Chinese luxury
marcin
(Marcin)
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