Sadistic Wart Removal

When I was a young boy living in Logandale, NV, I grew a large wart on my hand, between my thumb and forefinger. I was taken to the doctor at the little clinic on the way to Overton. The doctor looked at my wart and told me that a nurse would come in and do something to or around the wart, and then he would come back and remove it.

I sat there for 5-10 minutes or so, after which the doctor came back. The nurse had not come, but I think he assumed that she had. The doctor strode up to me, held my wrist in one hand, and with the other hand grabbed my wart and literally tore it off the skin of my hand. I cried out in pain. He looked at me incredulously and made some disparaging remark, calling me a baby or something like that.

I gaped in horror and pain at the large, bloody, open wound in my hand where the wart had once been attached. I was in shock that he had simply torn it out like that, with flesh tearing and severing from my hand. Young as I was, I knew this couldn't have been right. Then he took a machine with two metal needles attached, stuck the needles into my open wound, and began pulsing electricity through the needles. This shocked and hurt and felt awful.

That was my last recollection of the event, aside from later telling my parents (who weren't in the room) what had happened. They didn't believe me. They were utterly incredulous that a doctor would simply grab someone's wart and tear it off their hand.

I have often reflected on this bizarre medical event in my life and wondered what kind of a sadistic medieval doctor would do something like this to a young boy in our modern age. Had I lived in the 11th century in poverty, in some dirty corner of Europe, I would have expected some pathetic undertrained doctor to tear a wart from my hand, but in 1970's America? I am curious about a few things. Was non-anaesthetised wart-ripping a common practice for this doctor? Did many others have this done? Did he only do it this way to young kids whose parents weren't present in the room? Maybe I'll never know.