Totally awake. No pain relief. Just straight up raw-dogging surgery. In 1686, King Louis XIV's anal fistula got so bad that he needed to go under the knife. But surgery for an anal fistula didn't actually exist yet. In fact, surgery in general didn’t really exist at all. 

Enter Charles-François Felix, a 'Barber Surgeon' willing to take on the task. King Louis let Felix spend 6 months ‘practicing’ on inmates from the city’s prison, until he had perfected the procedure (or at least managed to perform it once without killing the guy). Once Charles-François Felix was ready to go, all ‘The Sun King’ had to do next was close his eyes, clench his fists, and stay completely still through a three hour anal surgery, the results of which changed the entire course of modern medicine. 

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A quick, visual (don't worry - animated!) explanation of how anal fistulas work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAOwqcoel_g  

Some articles:

https://tidsskriftet.no/2016/08/sun-kings-anal-fistula  

https://medium.com/omgfacts/when-anal-fistulas-were-all-the-rage-281aclfd2d52 

https://www.iflscience.com/that-time-the-kings-anus-changed-surgery-forever-65310 

https://hekint.org/2019/10/31/it-is-good-to-be-the-king-the-french-surgical-revolution/ 

https://historycollection.com/seven-worst-surgeries-modern-times/4/

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