6 days ago
EXCLUSIVE Woman, 101, details gruesome way doctors treated ear infections when she was young
A 101-year-old woman has shared the shocking ways that doctors treated ear infections when she was young - long before the introduction of antibiotics.
These days, if someone gets sick they head to the doctor, get a prescription for some medicine, and usually feel better within a few days.
But back in the 1920s, treatment for common ailments was very different.
Anita Astor, who was born in 1924, from the UK, recently opened up about the horrific ordeal that she was put through after she developed an ear infection as a toddler.
She explained in a recent TikTok video shared by her grandson, James Marsh, 42, that she had to get a procedure known as a mastoid operation that involved doctors drilling a hole into her skull to stop it from spreading to her brain.
She explained in the now-viral clip, which was viewed over three million times, that she underwent the surgery, which is done to remove infected tissues from the mastoid bone located behind your ear, once at age two and again at age five.
'In those days, the infection would go into your brain and you'd be finished in a few weeks,' she said in the TikTok.
'So if they wanted to save your life, they had to make a hole - I've got a hole literally in my head.'
While speaking exclusively with the Daily Mail about it, James explained that his grandmother told him that to make matters worse, the anesthetic used during surgery wasn't as strong then as it is now.
'The anesthetic was terrible, it wasn't like you went to sleep and you woke up after you had been operated on,' he shared.
'My grandma said there were lots of whizzing and banging sounds - you were part conscious during operations.
'It was a terrible thing and highly traumatic for her. But this was the norm back then.'
While she was recovering in the hospital James told the Daily Mail that his grandmother said she was treated 'like dirt' because her family was poor.
She recalled her parents being 'interrogated' about 'how much they earned and if they owned a house or a car' to determine how much they've have to pay.
'The pressures on poor people at the time was really intense. Her mother and father were refugees from Russia,' he continued.
'It wasn't just seeing their child sick, it was also the financial stress. If you didn't have money you couldn't get access to medical services.
'She said they treated like dirt, she wasn't treated like a human being at all, but more like a thing.'
Anita told him that during her recovery, the nurses would come in every morning and change the dressing on her surgery site, and she said it was extremely painful.
'The nurses would just rip off the bandage, most didn't care and weren't very kind,' he dished to the Daily Mail.
'They'd give her their fist to bite on [to stop her from screaming] because I imagine there were no painkillers either.'
Despite getting two surgeries, Anita said she spent years struggling with the effects from the ear infection.
But finally, in her 20s, antibiotics became readily available, which she described as a 'miracle.'
'Antibiotics were reserved for soldiers at first, they weren't given out to the general public until the war finished,' James explained.
'Her ear was still giving her trouble in her 20s - she was two and a half when it started and in her 20s she was still having problems from her infected ear.'
But when her doctor finally gave her antibiotics it 'cleared up' within days, and she 'never had any problem again.'
In more TikToks, Anita spoke in detail about other things that differed during her child compared to life now.
She explained that there weren't any diapers back then so they had to use cloth diapers on babies, which had to then be washed by hand every day.
She said laundry machines were extremely different, and involved placing the dirty clothes into a hot boiler.
The boilers left 'soot' over everything in the house, which meant they were forced to clean relentlessly.
'You had to work for everything,' she reflected.
She joked that she 'couldn't get over it' when they released the first dishwasher, branding it as a true 'treasure' and 'one of the most wonderful things' on Earth.
'But I'm always worried something's going to get cracked in there,' she joked.
