Interactive text game of surgery in early 1800s | Hacker News Reader

Interactive text game of surgery in early 1800s

oldoperatingtheatre.com

82 pointserehweb22 comments

Reminds me of Robert Liston and his 300% mortality surgery:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1202392

Liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant’s fingers along with a patient’s leg, according to Hollingham. The patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.

Twenty five seconds to amputate a leg with knives and handsaws. That is amazing.

And reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston, he didn’t even did battlefield surgery. I wonder how he got the experience.

https://www.civilwarmed.org/surgeons-call/limbs/:

“Surgery was performed expeditiously and amputation was the usual operation when the extremity had been injured. An amputation took only a few minutes. When the surgery for one patient was completed, another patient was waiting for the operating table. The amputated limbs, at times, accumulated in piles near the operating table before they could be disposed of. This was a gruesome sight and caused comments by uninvolved observers. Such piles of limbs were known to have existed as early as 1811, described by a British officer at a British hospital in France during the Napoleonic wars, at a time when surgery was being done without anesthesia”

Wow! Though Wikipedia asserts the case is most likely apocryphal.

If you are in London next week, there is an after hours surgical demonstration on the 11th. https://oldoperatingtheatre.com/event-posts/after-hours-surg...

This game made me cry, it’s hard to press through treating someone when you know how futile it is. It’s a bit depressing but at least there are people trying their best with what is available. I wish everyone the best health.

Trigger warning, it's described as a "text game", but there are also images.

I can see only one image (an exposed fracture) that could be considered gruesome, and it's a drawing.

Had to use Firefox for the game to work, but overall really nice game, quite educational

Also just in case for everyone - yes, it is possible to have her survive the surgery, keep trying

I found it pretty easy - the right answers seemed mostly obvious[0]. Wash hands, use the clean apron, use the sharp knife, don't touch corpses before surgery, don't try to do the surgery as fast as possible. The one I wasn't sure about was amputating below vs above the knee, but it turns out you succeed with either if you do most of the rest right (but it seems below the knee is better).

[0] Obvious to me, of course doctors at the time didn't understand germ theory.

I agree mostly, with two caveats:

"Wash hands" is crossed out if you choose it, "no time for that".

From what I've read, fast surgeries (not slow ones) were positively correlated with patient recovery. Wikipedia's page on Robert Liston (mentioned in another comment above) and Florence Nightingale both mention this.

Reminds me of the Life or Death games https://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-life-and-death/

I played quite a lot of this in middle school technology class. Think I actually successfully completed one of the simpler brain surgeries without killing the patient.

So crazy reading this and thinking how wrong some of the theories then were. Makes me wonder what todays theories are that people will look back and scoff.

Side note, also makes me miss playing drug wars on the TI calculators back in the day

I work in surgical simulation training tech. IMO biggest blind spots today are no longer in the medical knowledge or treatment technique itself, but in information and human resource training and organization.

We spend millions on sophisticated surgical robots, we have the worlds most advanced medicines, crazy tools, but patients still get hurt as simple mistakes occur when one person doesn’t succeed in conveying some critical piece of information to another person.

I am baffled as to how it is possible that the software developers in our office can handle Jira level complexity with the code base, while surgeons continue to use pen and paper to organize their bizarre schedules.

Pen and paper is said to be better for retention right?

For an individual, sure. I’m talking about the hospital as an information system.

I wish there were more scenarios to play, this was interesting and, in a way, fun.

> Women’s operations take place on Fridays at St Thomas’s.

This was a thing? :(

Crashes on startup in Chrome:

> index.html:601 Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document.

Twine, the engine used, is not so great on checking for feature availability. It assumes that webStorage is available and working, without testing. It also does the same with cookies, and a few other things, unfortunately.

.itch.io … Godot?

Yes, it is published on itch.io. But I wouldn't assume this was done using Godot. It looks more like html+js

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