MOST of us feel nervous about having an operation, but spare a thought for how it would have been 150 years ago.

Medical inventor Richard Berrecloth’s collection of antique instruments is a gruesome record of the past, including a surgical amputation kit from 1858.

An 11-inch saw, designed to hack through bone, is teamed with a tourniquet made from brass and canvas and a 10-inch knife known as the ‘nibbler’ to neaten-up jagged edges.

The father-of-six and former operating theatre assistant displays it in a museum on the third floor of his Kirtlington home.

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Mr Berrecloth, 55, has been collecting for 15 years and owns 100 pieces of anaesthesia, childbirth and blood-letting equipment, ranging in date from the 1850s to the late 1970s.

He said: “The chap who invented the amputation kit was aptly named George Shearer.

“If someone got that out when you were in the operating theatre you’d run a mile. It’s pretty gruesome.

“The nibbler looks like a giant toe-nail clipper because it’s long, with powerful jaws at the end.

“Looking back it’s unbelievable what was done to people in the 19th century without anaesthetic.

“Some would have fainted just from seeing the equipment, and frankly they were the lucky ones.”

Mr Berrecloth’s firm Alma Medical, started in 2010, supplies equipment to NHS and private hospitals nationwide.

Far from being put off by his macabre collection, his 47-year-old wife and former operating theatre assistant, Emma Berrecloth-Bale, who was born and brought up in Oxford, bought him the amputation kit as a gift.

The pair met in the old Radcliffe Infirmary eight years ago. “Our eyes met across a crowded operating theatre,” Mr Berrecloth joked.

Mr Berrecloth, who has also worked in the Nuffield Orthopaedic, Churchill and several London hospitals, started collecting in the 1980s after a government drive to modernise made the old equipment redundant.

Other pieces in his collection include an original 1950s midwife’s kit bag, with gas and air, like those used in TV series Call The Midwife, a breathing mask which “looks like something out of a scary Doctor Who episode”, a 1960s-skull retractor to lift skull flaps, a clockwork syringe pump from the 1950s, a 1930s German ether bottle, a morphine pack for injured RAF parachutists to inject themselves with pain killer and a 1950s blood-letting set.

Items have come mostly from hospital clearouts, but Mr Berrecloth estimates he has spent up to £5,000 on eBay and at carboot sales.

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