In 1900, Freud published “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s airship took its first flight, and Max Planck formulated quantum theory.

On “The Knick,” a medical drama that begins on Friday on Cinemax, a surgeon makes his 12th attempt to perform a C-section on a woman with a hemorrhage in the womb, but in those days, before modern blood transfusions, mother and infant die. “The procedure failed,” his junior colleague tells him as they wash up after the operation. “You didn’t.”

It was the dawn of a new era, but not the American century quite yet; some of the most daring scientific advances were being made in London, Paris and Vienna. On “The Knick,” the doctors and nurses at the Knickerbocker, a fictional hospital in Lower Manhattan, are mavericks, struggling to save lives by gaslight. Surgery is still quite primitive, and the show’s medical scenes are so gruesome and bloodily rendered that they are almost hazardous to watch.

“The Knick” is unusual and very good. It’s a great leap backward in time, yet another ambitious examination of an important but often overlooked epoch in history. Television keeps forging new bridges to the past. And like “Mad Men” or “Manh(a)ttan,” this show has a revisionist agenda: It, too, explores a field that was defined and dominated by white men, adding contributions by African-Americans and women.