Pioneering Japanese surgeon Seishu Hanaoka, with his mother (left) and wife (Image: International Museum of Surgical Science)

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“When the dreadful steel was plunged into my breast… I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision. I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still, so excruciating was the agony.” When English writer Fanny Burney had surgery for breast cancer in 1811, she felt every move of the knife as the surgeon cut through her all too resistant flesh. The introduction of ether and chloroform as general anaesthetics was still 35 years away. Yet, unknown to doctors in the west, Japanese surgeon Seishu Hanaoka had performed the same operation several years earlier – and his patient hadn’t felt a thing.

IT WAS nine months before Fanny Burney could bring herself to write about the operation to remove her breast. In a letter to her sister Esther, she described in harrowing detail what she had felt as the surgeon cut and scraped and cut some more. By the early 19th century, Europe’s surgeons had the knowledge and skills to perform major operations. What they didn’t have was an effective anaesthetic. Opium or copious amounts of cognac could help dull the pain, but no one had yet found a reliable way to render a patient unconscious during surgery – or so European surgeons thought.

Unknown to the rest of the world, on 13 October 1804, Japanese surgeon Seishu Hanaoka had put 60-year-old Kan Aiya under with a general anaesthetic in order to remove her cancerous breast. While Hanaoka’s surgical technique owed …