1811 mastectomy

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

In honor World Anesthesia Day, a snippet of Fanny Burney's account of her (unanesthetized) 1811 mastectomy, was excerpted in our Medicine issue: http://bit.ly/10wnO1C

"When the wound was made and the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp and forked poniards that were tearing the edges of the wound. But when again I felt the instrument--describing a curve, curing against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand of the operator, who was foxed to change from the right to the left--then, indeed, I thought I must have expired..."