This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

Around 1829, a woman from the Scottish Highlands arrived at the University of Edinburgh Hospital for surgery.

She had breast cancer and was getting a mastectomy with one of the most famous and renowned surgeons in the country, James Liston.

Every time Liston performed surgeries, medical students crowded into the theater to learn his extraordinary techniques.

Sometimes the students were so close to the operating table that they'd be splattered with blood.

Legend has it that, before he began surgery, Liston would shout to the med students in the audience,

Time me, gentlemen.

While this brag may seem crass, it may have comforted the patient.

Before anesthesia and antiseptics, patients were awake during surgery and would feel every cut.

The best strategy a surgeon had to ease the patient's

suffering was to get the operation over with as quickly as possible. Liston was one of the fastest

surgeons in the country. While most at the time took a couple of minutes to amputate a limb, Liston could do it in just 30 seconds.

Mestectomies were particularly gruesome and painful.

After taking the woman from the Highland into the medical theater and securing her onto the operating table with leather straps.

Liston held her down with one hand and wielded a hook with the other. He used the hook to,

trigger warning, lift the soft tissue of her breast before slicing her breast with two

clean cuts as she writhed and screamed.

The medical students watched carefully, taking careful notes, except for one of them.

A 19-year-old named James Young Simpson.

Simpson was so disturbed and overwhelmed by the woman's pain that he

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