Roald Dahl recounts this in his book 'Boy'
> I have only one unpleasant memory of the summer holidays in
Norway. We were in the grandparents’ house in Oslo and my mother
said to me, “We are going to the doctor this afternoon. He wants to
look at your nose and mouth.”
> I think I was eight at the time. “What’s wrong with my nose and
mouth?” I asked.
“Nothing much,” my mother said. “But I think you’ve got
adenoids.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
I held my mother’s hand as we walked to the doctor’s house. It
took us about half an hour. There was a kind of dentist’s chair in the
surgery and I was lifted into it. The doctor had a round mirror
strapped to his forehead and he peered up my nose and into my
mouth. He then took my mother aside and they held a whispered
conversation. I saw my mother looking rather grim, but she nodded.
> The doctor now put some water to boil in an aluminum mug over
a gas flame, and into the boiling water he placed a long thin shiny
steel instrument. I sat there watching the steam coming off the boiling
water. I was not in the least apprehensive. I was too young to realize
that something out of the ordinary was going to happen.
Then a nurse dressed in white came in. She was carrying a red rubber
apron and a curved white enamel bowl. She put the apron over the
front of my body and tied it around my neck. It was far too big. Then
she held the enamel bowl under my chin. The curve of the bowl fitted
perfectly against the curve of my chest.
The doctor was bending over me. In his hand he held that long
shiny steel instrument. He held it right in front of my face, and to this
day I can still describe it perfectly. It was about the thickness and
length of a pencil, and like most pencils it had a lot of sides to it.
Towards the end, the metal became much thinner, and at the very end
of the thin bit of metal there was a tiny blade set at an angle. The
blade wasn’t more than a centimeter long, very small, very sharp and
very shiny.
> “Open your mouth,” the doctor said, speaking Norwegian.
I refused. I thought he was going to do something to my teeth,
and everything anyone had ever done to my teeth had been painful.
“It won’t take two seconds,” the doctor said. He spoke gently,
and I was seduced by his voice. Like an ass, I opened my mouth.
The tiny blade flashed in the bright light and disappeared into
my mouth. It went high up into the roof of my mouth. It went high up
into the roof of my mouth, and the hand that held the blade gave four
or five very quick little twists and the next moment, out of my mouth
into the basin came tumbling a whole mass of flesh and blood.
I was too shocked and outraged to do anything but yelp. I was
horrified by the huge red lumps that had fallen out of my mouth into
the white basin and my first thought was that the doctor had cut out
the whole of the middle of my head.
>“Those were your adenoids,” I heard the doctor saying.
> ...
> That was in 1924, and taking out a child’s adenoids, and often
the tonsils as well, without any anesthetic was common practice in
those days.