Dr. Thomas Bolton fights for the use of anesthetic in surgery and uses himself as a guinea pig, but soon finds himself addicted.
A lot of fun watching two great horror icons together like Boris Karloff and Sir Christopher Lee. I'm so glad The Criterion Collection bothered putting this foursome out in their 'Monsters and Madmen' boxed set. Such a guilty pleasure to behold, in its intriguing period-piece script of a well-meaning doctor trying to discover anesthesia yet getting drug-addicted in the process. Great stuff.
I'm so close to surgery without pain.
Dr. Thomas Bolton is one of London's top surgeons, brilliant and fast, he is however constantly troubled by the amount of pain his patients go through, for this be a time before anaesthesia. Painstakingly working on a formula to put patients to sleep during surgery, Bolton is convinced he has found a breakthrough, but upon trialling it in front of the board it goes terribly wrong. He continues undaunted, but as he keeps testing the formula out on himself he becomes badly addicted, unable to get the hospital board to sanction his research, he gets involved with a dastardly group of murderers who kill and then sell off corpse's to a suspect doctor.
Make no (saw) bones about it, this is a wonderful ...