Nuns With Bleeding Eyes! Illustrations of 19th C Surgery

Back when I had TV, one of the channels I would find myself lingering on was the surgery channel. I can’t describe the feeling I experienced as I watched the innards of someone I didn’t know pulsating under bright lights and flashing steel instruments – kind of a combination of chills, queasiness, and captivation. I had a love-hate relationship with it, but I kept coming back for more.

So when I stumbled across these awesome illustrations of 19th Century surgical techniques, I flashed back to those shiny, clinical images, but in a much more artistic form. Pictured are amputations, incisions, Caesarians, and eyeball punctures, but all beautifully rendered in a series of gorgeous 19th Century illustrations. These all hail from the book Crucial Interventions: An Illustrated Treatise on the Principles & Practice of Nineteenth-Century Surgery by Dr. Richard Barnett (available here). These are nice images – stay tuned for the really gross ones…