The Backstory: 10,000 Years of Surgery With No Anesthesia
Elvis Duran and the Morning Show ON DEMAND
Elvis Duran Podcast Network and iHeartPodcasts
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have you ever thought about what surgery would have been like before the advent of anesthesia? Doctors did everything from amputations to mastectomies to tooth extraction with almost no pain relief for the patient. Their secret was speed, and their assistants were the original men in black.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, have you ever had surgery, stitches, broken bone, or even a tooth pole? |
| 0:05.2 | Human beings have been dealing with those kinds of painful traumas for thousands of years. |
| 0:10.6 | Now, try to imagine what any of that would have been like before anesthesia. |
| 0:15.4 | I'm Patty Steele, when surgery involved a room full of dressers, a lot of speed cutting, |
| 0:22.3 | and pretty much no pain relief. |
| 0:23.1 | That's next on the backstory. |
| 0:27.1 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:32.2 | People called them murderers. |
| 0:34.5 | Ten years later, they were gods. |
| 0:37.0 | Today, no one knows their names. A group of maverick |
| 0:40.5 | surgeons who took on the medical establishment who risked everything to invent open-heart |
| 0:45.3 | surgery. Welcome to the Wild West of American Medicine. I'm Chris Pine, and this is Cardiac Cowboys. |
| 0:52.5 | If you like medical dramas, if you like heart-pounding thrillers, you will love cardiac |
| 0:56.8 | cowboys. |
| 0:58.0 | Listen on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. |
| 1:01.9 | Sponsored by Jasper, AI Build for Marketers. |
| 1:05.2 | Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and I'm the host of the on-purpose podcast. |
| 1:08.8 | Recently, I had a conversation with the one and only, Madonna. |
| 1:13.0 | When I was broke and I had no friends, nowhere to live, I was held up at gunpoint, I was robbed. |
| 1:19.1 | Always horrendous things happened to me. |
| 1:20.9 | I had such an unhappy childhood that whatever happened to me in New York is better than what my life was, so I'm not going back. |
| 1:28.6 | Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
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