The Knick is about a lot of sexy things: there's cocaine addiction, back-alley cadaver deals, and actual sex. But it's also full of real-world historical science. The discoveries, the inventions, even the cocaine addiction, are real—a fact that can be both fascinating and horrifying.
Take, for example, "Thackery's point"—the location Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen) finds that allows him to safely perform an appendectomy. It wasn't discovered by the show's fictitious main character, but it was located by Charles McBurney in roughly the same time period as the show. (It's still known as "McBurney's point.") That crazy nose reconstruction (above) Thackery does for a woman who loses part of her snout to syphilis? That was also a common treatment at the time, having been invented in Italy during the Renaissance and used for years thereafter. The early 1900s, as The Knick shows, was also when X-rays were coming into common usage. (However, people didn't entirely understand that long-term exposure to radiation could kill you.)
"That was an era of great invention and an era that created the middle class. You had the development of electricity, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the radio," says Stanley Burns, the show's medical advisor and founder of the Burns Archive, which provides historical photographs to ensure *The Knick'*s accuracy. "You had all these conveyances—it looked like an age of miracles. Medicine mimicked that."
Even though it seemed like an age of miracles, it was also a time filled with trial and error when it came to medical practice. Patients died frequently as the result of botched procedures that would be routine for a first-year resident on Grey's Anatomy. But many of the tools Thackery and his colleagues at the Knickerbocker Hospital use look very similar to their modern-day counterparts—proving that some of those trials weren't errors.
And that's the way the practice of medicine has always been. "I just came back from my medical reunion and one of the doctors said that he will never forget his most embarrassing moment," Burns says. "He went to a lecture and the doctor was saying, '50 percent of what I'm telling you is not going to be true.' One of the students raised their hand and said, 'Well then why do we have to learn it all?' And the doctor said, 'Because we don't know which 50 percent.'"
Many of the devices and treatments used on The Knick fall into that fuggitaboutit 50 percent. But not all of them. Click through the gallery above for a breakdown of some of the show's coolest, weirdest gadgets and treatments, along with their real-world origins.
