Meatgrinder Surgery

"Anyvay, zat's how I lost my medical license."

"Right, first I'll take those teef out for yer, dat should help ease da pain in yer leg. Grokkit, 'and me dat wrench. Now then... Open wide, an' say... AAARGH!"

— Ork Dok Gutslash, Warhammer 40,000

Surgeries are dangerous and delicate things. There's a reason why "brain surgeon" is a byword for "genius" — they have to spend hours carefully maneuvering minute instruments and a millimeter's error can kill their patient or worse.

Naturally, expect this aspect of medicine to be thrown away in the name of comedy: the nurse will give the surgeon a hammer and he'll immediately proceed to whack away violently, then an axe and proceed to hack away, then a drill, then a chainsaw, then an eggbeater, then...

If anaesthesia is administered, it's either by a sledgehammer to the head or copious amounts of booze. For an extra gag, the booze may turn out to be for the surgeon. But most of the time, this type of surgery will Skip the Anesthetic. And in the rare instance that anesthetic is involved, expect the surgeon to use it all on themselves.

Don't expect to see what's going on with the patient during the operation, or an explanation as to why piercing his head is going to help with his Hiccup Hijinks, but he'll likely step away from the operation room completely healthy and his medical problem will be gone (or at least, he won't be horribly mutilated). However, agonised screaming and blood splattering across the screen are par for the course.

More rarely, this can also be Played for Drama. The trope might be justified if the surgery takes place before the 20th century, for instance, or under field conditions, or both. In the absolute worst-case scenario, you'll be in the tender hands of a Mad Doctor Playing with Syringes, where the strange and brutal violations of medical ethics (and your bodily integrity) are entirely the point — either For Science! or just because they're a great big sadist. Whatever the reason, it's never pretty— pray they'll go for a Discretion Shot.

Common culprits for the comedy version are the Morally Ambiguous Doctor, Mad Doctor, or Depraved Dentist, while the dramatic version will more likely involve The Medic or the Frontier Doctor. A Back-Alley Doctor might be used for either. This trope might be one of the reasons for a Doctor's Disgraceful Demotion.

Compare with Comically Inept Healing and Worst Aid. This may often result in a Major Injury Underreaction.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Afro Samurai, when Jinno is turned into a cyborg. This might qualify as Black Comedy, or the cartoonish nature of the scene might make it worse.
• Batting Female Doctor Saori is about a female doctor^note named Saori who heals her patients by hitting them. With a baseball bat. Usually across the room. Not only that, she can repair cars, tame panthers and win baseball games with her skill.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans has the Ayla-Vijnana system; a Brain/Computer Interface where a pilot can control a machine (such as a mobile suit) primarily through thought via a port embedded in their spine. The surgery is stated to be very painful, usually being done with no anaesthesia, leaves a grotesque steel and flesh tube sticking out of the patient's back, and has an absurdly high failure rate (around 40%, in which case the patient is usually permanently crippled if they survive) and is exclusively performed on children.

Board Games

• The board game Operation, naturally. The game's implication is made obvious during commercials.
  • Don't be absurd. If you do it badly, you lose the game and have to listen to a buzzer make an awful sound.
  • Players who are already losing anyway will take their frustration out on the patient, who's already screaming anyway.

Comic Strips

• Liberty Meadows:
  • Frank tries to be professional, but occasionally falls into this trope, usually helped along by keeping Leslie (who has had no medical training) as his assistant. One notable example is when Frank is performing an operation but has no anesthesia thanks to budget cuts. When he asks what painkillers they have left, Leslie offers up a six-pack of beer and a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. When Frank opts to use the latter, Leslie gets several sentences in before everyone (Frank included) falls asleep from boredom. The next comic shows that the patient has begun to wake up mid-surgery, so Leslie is preparing to knock him out with a sledgehammer.
  • Another time Ralph the Mad Scientist circus bear and Leslie tried to perform liposuction on Dean (Frank refused to do it). They anesthetized him with a mallet and tried to use an ordinary vacuum for the liposuction, it caved his head in so they tried reversing the flow causing his head to overinflate. Next thing they show Frank has tried to undo the damage they did, resulting in Dean resembling Jabba the Hutt.
• Calvin and Hobbes makes carving a pumpkin sound like this:
  Calvin: OK, JACK, TIME FOR YOUR LOBOTOMY!! Hand me a big spoon, will you, Hobbes?
  Hobbes: Ugh! No anesthetic even.

Fan Works

• Played for Drama in Webwork when the Jorogumo Queen transplants the Vessel filled with hundreds of spider eggs into Jade with the only comfort being a rock to bite into, with the whole process given in horrifying detail, to the point that the author actually interrupts the story with a warning to squeamish readers to skip over that section altogether.
• Played for Drama in Alone, Together: Kim and Shego have been stranded in an otherwise unpopulated world long enough to become friends when Kim develops appendicitis. Shego manages to perform an appendectomy guided by a frantic review of medical texts, constantly terrified that one wrong move will kill Kim and leave her utterly alone.
• Since the cyborgs in Left Beyond are unable to feel pain and very difficult to kill beyond hope of reanimation short of getting blown up or burned, the Omega's doctors occasionally do this in the name of efficiency.
• Spice Fortress: Is there a Medic in The House, Melanie The Fighter is subjected to this, never mind the fact she wasn’t given any kind of pain killers. At least, she was pretty chill about it.

Films — Animated

• Wilbur in The Rescuers Down Under is threatened with this by a group of mice before he decides he feels fine and decides to check out early.
• Kenny gets one of these in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, after his attempt to set his fart on fire literally backfires. They end up replacing his heart with a baked potato.
• Sadly, this is the fate of the hapless protagonist of Mad God. And if the scenery indicates anything, this isn't the first time this has happened to someone like him

Films — Live-Action

• Hitchhiker Massacre: At one point, the killer harvests a victim's organs in his basement by cutting her side open with an exact-o knife, pulling out the organ with his hands, and then sawing it off.
• Monty Python's The Meaning of Life features two "surgeons" forcibly harvesting organs from a man just because he's got an organ donor card. Mostly offscreen but obviously Meat Grinder Surgery.
  Man: "Mr. Jones? We've come for you liver."
  Mr. Jones: "But I'm using it right now."
• This trope is common in The Three Stooges shorts, especially the hammer anesthetic.
• Played for Drama in Revenge of the Sith: After his near-fatal duel with Obi-Wan on Mustafar, Darth Vader is rushed to Coruscant for emergency surgery to turn him into a Cyborg. Vader is fully conscious and screaming in pain throughout the procedure; in fact, Palpatine had specifically ordered the medical droids to keep him awake during the surgery, knowing that the pain would fuel his rage, and thus his power.
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home presents 1980's medicine as this, from the perspective of 23rd-century Starfleet surgeon Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, along with a subplot to rescue Chekhov from such primitive attempts at medicine.
• Played for Drama in Saw III. Lynn Denlon is abducted and held hostage by Amanda Young under the threat of death so she'll provide medical attention to John Kramer, whose health is rapidly declining due to his advanced cancer reaching his brain. Without a surgical theater or any real operating tools, she's forced to use a power drill and small circular saw to cut away a piece of John's skull and relieve the cranial pressure.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man, Tony Stark is given major thoracic surgery in a cave with a box of scraps. He wakes up with a car battery wired into his chest. Justified as the Ten Rings are hardly going to let the guy they just abducted go to a hospital.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Rocket is confirmed to be an Uplifted Animal created by Orgocrop cybernetically enhancing him. The surgery was apparently performed while he was still awake and struggling, before he was tossed in a cage while still bleeding. Nebula says what was done to him was worse than what Thanos did to her, even though her own cybernetic surgeries were explicitly a form of torture.
• Done in the Sub Story Destination Tokyo. Based on a real incident aboard USS Seadragon, a pharmacist's mate performs an emergency appendectomy on one of his crewmates.
• Following the disastrous first battle of Klendatu in Starship Troopers, Carmen and Zander walk by a one-legged soldier who pleads: "Just give me something, doc!"
• In Downfall, the only way to treat any serious injury during the battle of Berlin is to knock out the patient and amputate a limb, which has filled up the buckets used to collect them. And medicine, including painkillers, are becoming desperately rare.
• In Sleepy Hollow (1999), Icabod is tasked with analyzing Emily's then-decapitated remains. As soon as he pokes around with it, the bloody-stump squirts a bit of blood onto his glasses. By the time he is done, he is completely covered in blood.
• In Repo! The Genetic Opera, a worldwide pandemic of organ failures means surgery is now sexy and you can refinance your essential organs. The Repo Man will make sure you are current on payments or reclaim those organs via this trope. Naturally, the results are Bloody Hilarious with no survivors - the Repo Man is trying to reclaim the organ, not save the patient.
  Because the claims medic gives no anesthetic.
• In Le Comiche 2 (an Italian movie from the 90s) there are a couple of examples:
  • A man is hospitalized agaist his will. He ends up in a surgery room and mixed up with a female patient waiting for a breast augmentation. Bewildered by the situation, he only realises what is about to happen when the surgeon feels his chest mentioning he will give the patient a "couple of nice boobs". At that point he is already wearing the mask with flowing anaesthetic. In a desperate attempt to avert the operation he screams through the mask and tries to get up. The medical personnel holds him down until he is sound asleep.
  • The same man ends up in a second hospital. He was stripped to his underwear that comprehends a bra supporting the breasts previously received. Mistaken for a transgender, he is taken to a surgery room where a surgeon displays a big pair of scissors that will be used to cut off his genitals and give him "a nice pussy" (his words). The poor man faints while the operation starts.

Literature

• Played for Awesomeness in Runes Of The Earth. After Stave gets subjected to a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, Linden has to perform surgery on him to save his life. However, the only "tool" she has is wild magic, which is more normally used for things like blowing up mountains or battling powerful sorcerors. She still manages to seal Stave's wounds, and he eventually recovers.
• Standard medical practice in Discworld's Ankh-Morpork involves hitting the patient over the head with a hammer to anesthetize them. The only real doctor in the city (Dr. Lawn from Night Watch) is seen as crazy for worrying about things like sanitation, sterilization, and the survival of his patients... until Sam Vimes rewarded him for saving his wife and newborn son by helping him open his own hospital. This is one of the reasons that, prior to Night Watch, the most employed physician in the city was "Doughnut Jimmy" Folsom, a horse vet. The reasoning goes, a good racehorse is expensive and a big earner, so Jimmy could choose between keeping his patients alive or having the last words he hears be something like "Da boss is very unhappy."
  • Ankh-Morpork is also the home of the delightful new form of medicine known as "retrophrenology."
• Eric Flint's book 1812: The Rivers of War provides an excellent example of this, which was Truth in Television at the time. The patient denies the issued anesthetic, which is raw Navy rum (he has a bottle of emergency laudanum packed away, which he uses), but he knows that refusing the anesthetic the surgeon tried to give him would be good for his reputation regardless. Also, a quote:
  "Few lumberjacks wielded a saw as vigorously as an Army surgeon after a major battle."
• The MASH surgeons referred to what they were doing as "meatball surgery" — doing quick (but hopefully not too dirty) surgery, keeping the patient alive but leaving follow-ups to the better-equipped Evac hospitals. Naturally, many of the plots involved the protagonists trying to avert or subvert this trope, but it still arose from time to time.
  Hawkeye: Our general attitude around here is that we want to play par surgery on this course. Par is a live patient. We're not sweet swingers, and if we've gotta kick it in with our knees to get a par that's how we do it.
• This trope is zig-zagged in the Temeraire series. Human medical treatment is standard for The Napoleonic Wars, however, the tools used by dragon surgeons could easily pass for melee weapons... but then given the scale of their patients most of the injuries that can be treated by human physicians are relatively superficial.
• Touched upon in the Tom Clancy novel Without Remorse, whose protagonist has some rather ugly scars from "meatball surgery" of the sort touched upon in the entry for M*A*S*H below.
• Lauchlan of Mix Beer With Liquor And You Will Get Sicker was subjected to this sort of surgery as a child, having had his right eye gouged by an angry jackdaw, and a serious compound fracture from the subsequent fall that both had to be tended to right then and there. He was given alcohol but that didn't quite do the trick, his family members actually had to hold him down so that the surgeon could work. It was justified in that it was set in the 1800s, and Lauchlan would have likely bled to death in the time taken to get him to any proper anesthetics. As you can imagine, Lauchlan was, and remains, rather traumatized by the incident.
• Naked Lunch: Oh, Doctor Benway— and really, any medical procedure in the novel is deeply fucked up.

Live-Action TV

• This was used quite a bit in Monty Python's Flying Circus.
  • Gumby Brain Surgery. Complete with a blow-to-the-head anesthetic.
  • In another sketch the surgeon character asks a nurse for something more substantial than a scalpel, is given a bread knife and starts sharpening it with gusto ("Ooh, I do enjoy this!"). Then he makes a bold incision along the entire patient.
• In The Muppet Show, Rowlf occasionally gets to begin such an operation in the "Veterinarian's Hospital" sketches.
• Sharpe: Comes up once or twice, set as it is in the Napoleonic Wars. Sharpe himself removes a man's shattered arm with a sword (it's easier to stop the bleeding from one large wound than lots of little ones) and Harper pulls out one of his own teeth with pliers.
• The events of one episode of Stargate Atlantis forced Dr. Keller to perform brain surgery on McKay with a power drill in a dank cave.
• One Stargate SG-1 episode involved Colonel Mitchell (who is NOT a doctor) performing surgery on a severely injured Carter while hiding out from bad guys.
• Surgery in M*A*S*H is generally not as bad as this trope, but the various characters regard it that way since it is a lot rougher than it would be in a proper hospital. The general term used in the show is "Meatball Surgery". Of course, being a frontline hospital unit, their jobs are to simply to save the patient and make sure they stay alive long enough to get sent to an evac hospital where they can be further treated before being sent to a hospital either in Tokyo or Stateside. In a very real sense, the exasperation expressed about the conditions they worked in and speed in which they needed to act was an aversion (or at least Lampshade Hanging) of this trope, as they were taking all the care they could under trying circumstances.
  • Characters would occasionally help out at front line aid stations or at Korean field hospitals where they had to conduct even cruder procedures than at the 4077.
    • At a Korean field hospital:
    Hawkeye: I wouldn't operate on your horse under these conditions.
    Col. Potter: My horse wouldn't be caught dead in here.
  • As a Long Runner, the series was able to show this aspect of field surgery in much greater detail than the novel or film could, despite the stricter rules about showing explicit gore. Several of the best-remembered episodes, including "O.R." and "Life Time", focus almost entirely on the pressure the surgical staff faced.
• Helena from Orphan Black actually does this on herself to remove a piece of rebar from her liver. No discretion shot for you.
• One medical sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Look involved the new techniques of hitting patients with sledgehammers and frying pans.
• On Rome, after Titus gets a skull fracture from being struck on the head in a tavern brawl, he's tied into place, gagged, and the surgeon removes the piece of skull that got loose, then fits a small metal plate in. Titus passed out from the pain early on, thankfully.
• The realistic version is Played for Drama in Code Black on a very regular basis, given that time is frequently short and resources often scarce at best. Drs. Leanne Rorish and Ethan Willis, in particular, have turned the "splash-and-slash"^note splash on some antiseptic, then slash the patient open into a bona fide art form.
• A realistic depiction takes place in Game of Thrones, emphasizing that this is a Low Fantasy pseudo-Medieval world where surgical knowledge is generally... not very advanced. One of the most gruesome surgeries seen yet appears in Season 7, where an attempt to treat the fantastical leprosy-equivalent called grayscale involves slicing away the scabrous infected epidermal layers with knives and painting the raw skin beneath with some kind of healing ointment.

Jokes

• The doctor walks into the surgery ward, followed by a bloke with a huge axe. The doctor reads from the list:
  Patient A - amputate right arm
  *Whack*
  Patient B - amputate left arm
  *Whack*
  Patient c - amputate left leg
  *Whack*
  I said "leg"
  *Whack*
  I said "left"
  *Whack*

Music

• They Might Be Giants: "Dr. Sy Fly" is about a mutant fly-headed doctor with questionable medical practices. The music video shows him with a compulsive desire to cut things in half with his bonesaw.
  He's going to have to amputate
  He's going to chop off all that you got
  Yank out the stuff inside of you
  After which he'll play nine holes of golf

• The Drugs Song by the British comedy duo Amateur Transplants is a Patter Song that lists an impossibly long sequence of various drugs that need to be known by a GP doctor, and then ends in this gem of a quote:
  Or fuck 'em all and get a job in orthopedic surgery.
• Eminem: The music video for "Godzilla" ends with a scene of Dr. Dre (who is Not That Kind of Doctor) and Slim Shady (armed with a rusty cleaver) operating on Eminem after anaesthetising him with whisky. They detach Em's mouth from his body, where it flops around rapping uncontrollably as Eminem scrabbles around after it.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic: "Like a Surgeon" stars Al as a comically incompetent surgeon who fumbles organs to the ground, uses medical equipment such as chainsaws and power drills, and eats lunch over the patient's open chest, while his orderlies huff sedative gas and a goldfish winds up in the IV.

Pinball

• Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity: The launch trailer and the deep dive both show that the surgical instruments in "Like a Surgeon" include a chainsaw and kitchen knives.

Tabletop Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Goblin Chirurgeon ("Chirurgeon" is a middle English term for surgeon), who kills live goblins to make sure other creatures can live. One art has one sawing away at a goblin's leg to give to another goblin who has lost theirs. The goblin getting his leg hacked off is awake at the time.
  • Goblin Medics simply deal damage to other creatures, but this trope is specifically involved in the card's flavor text. The original text is a perversion of the Hippocratic Oath ("First, do some harm."), while the later version mentions that the medic in question learned his trade "from the finest butcher shops in Yotia".
• Ravenloft: It's implied that this is the sort of "surgery" used by Frantisek Markov, the Darklord of Markovia, to turn victims into Broken Ones, although there is at least some magic involved as well. Justified as he was actually an uneducated butcher prior to his Jumping Off the Slippery Slope into becoming a Darklord. He uses no anesthetic, in any case.
• Shadowrun: If you're really unlucky in choosing a Backalley Doctor, this is what you wind up with. The result tends to be less "medicine" and more "chop out your organs and cyberware, then sell your corpse to ghouls."
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Ork doctors, known as Painboyz, Doks, or Mad Doks. Their idea of "anesthesia" is giving the patient a violent concussion. Some don't even bother to use anesthetic at all, preferring to have their patient squirming and kicking so they know he's still alive. Orks are so inhumanly tough that they not only survive but usually fully recover very quickly — which to the doks means they have plenty of leeway for experimentation and personal amusement (successful ork head transplants are entirely possible). Having a Painboy in a unit gives all of its members a chance of ignoring damage — it's unclear whether this is because the dok treats the injuries, or if the nearby reminder of what awaits the injured encourages Orks to ignore little things like bullets to the head and missing limbs.
    Mad Dok: This is gonna 'urt a lot! But you'll be bettah, you'll see!...
    • Gorkamorka has somewhere in the neighbourhood of six pages of rules for visiting the Dok after a scrap (usually several scraps after the injury is sustained, in fact, since it'd take that long for the injured Ork's comrades to convince him to go). Particularly notable results on the tables for this included replacing the patient's brain with that of a face-eater squig, bolting a thruster pack to the unfortunate Ork's spine, and the Dok forgetting what he was doing and operating on the wrong part of the body.
    • This type of surgery is why the famed Dok Grotsnik is totally insane. In an attempt to save him after an attack by some angry patients, his Gretchin "nurses" went to work. Before it was over, they had vomited in his open skull, a spider had found a comfy spot to rest in his head and he died half-a-dozen times on the table. When he came to, what little sanity he originally had was long gone.
  • The World Eaters are a group of War God-worshipping lunatics who don't care whose blood they spill (the enemy's, their allies', their own...) who have lobes of their brain removed so as to no longer feel fear. The individuals to whom this delicate task is trusted are, of course, known as berserker surgeons.
  • The Haemonculi, the Mad Scientist caste of the Dark Eldar, approach this trope from the opposite direction. They're the foremost medical geniuses of an incredibly advanced culture built around the artistic application of pain, meaning that they see surgery and Cold-Blooded Torture as essentially the same thing, and take pride in how messy and bizarre they can make their medical treatments while still fixing whatever ails their patient. As a result, they're amongst the most respected and dreaded people in the Wretched Hive of Commorragh, where almost everyone needs their services and almost nobody wants them.

Theater

• A skit frequently used at summer camps is all about this, with everyone standing behind a sheet so only the shadows can be seen. There are several variations depending on who is performing it and where, but some include:
  • The doctors (a normal stethoscope/lab coat doctor and a tribal witch-doctor) initially stated that neither had performed surgery before. It was clear that they had no idea what they were doing.
  • The patient was knocked out by being hit over the head with a sledgehammer and woken up by being hit again.
  • The chainsaw-as-surgical-instrument subtrope made an appearance.
  • The doctors accidentally removed the patient's heart, which bounced around for a few seconds and then exploded.
  • Despite the doctors making a huge mess and accomplishing nothing, the patient exclaimed, "I feel much better now!" at the end.

Video Games

• The Amateur Surgeon series is based all around this since the main character is a Back-Alley Doctor with a talent for improvising. Why use a scalpel when you have a pizza cutter? Lighters can cauterize pretty well, can't they? Surely a Chainsaw would make for a perfect bone saw, right? And yet, plot-wise, every successful amateur surgery works.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • Roughly half the tie-in video animation "Meet the Medic" involves the RED Medic performing surgery on the Heavy, in a procedure involving a device (which, as it turns out, enables the Übercharge in-game) getting shoved onto Heavy's still-beating heart, said heart exploding and being replaced with a "Mega Baboon" heart, and Medic pushing the organ into the Heavy's chest cavity so hard he breaks off a rib. All while the Heavy is awake, mind you. Mind you, the Medic's nigh-magical Medigun, plus the Cartoon Physics of the Team Fortress 2 universe, allow him to throw caution out the window.
    Heavy: Should I be awake for this?
    Medic: [laughs] Well, no. But as long as you are, could you hold your rib cage open a bit?
  • Not to mention he allows his pet doves to roam the room during operations. Archimedes, pictured above, even likes to hang out inside patients' ribcages. The only thing the Medic finds objectionable about this is that "It's filthy in there!". At the end of "Meet the Medic", it turns out that he accidentally sewed Scout's chest with Archimedes still inside. In gameplay, occasionally it will pop out of a gibbed Scout and fly away.
  • Even the opening Noodle Incident qualifies:
    Medic: When the patient woke up, his skeleton was missing, and the doctor was never heard from again! [laughs] Anyway, that's how I lost my medical license.
  • The Medic's idea of "proper surgical garb" is whatever he happens to be wearing at the time. In "Meet the Medic", "surgical garb" is a sweater vest and shirt. Oddly enough, he only puts on a lab coat and gloves when he's preparing for battle.
  • In the promo "The Sound of Medicine", the Medic develops a device for reviving people in the middle of the battlefield. This process apparently uses the Medigun's normal healing ability while telekinetically reassembling the victim back to normal. That last part was not a metaphor, it literally lifts the gibs back into a holographic template.
  • During the webcomic tie-in The Naked and the Dead, a meatgrinder transfusion is shown, with Medic simply scooping the blood out of puddles with any available cloth (including underwear) and pouring it back into his exsanguinated team's wounds, getting them back in order instantly (albeit causing blood to spurt violently out of their eyes if squeezed). The ensuing conversation between Ms. Pauling and the Medic lampshades it, with him joking about medical school being useless, then telling her as a Two-Faced Aside that worrying about blood types is the least of her problems. It'd seem he's plenty aware none of what he does makes much sense, but it works anyways; why should he bother? Then again, it's later revealed that he received his nonsensical but functional techniques through a Deal with the Devil, which pretty much gives him the ability to think up whatever stupid solution he can think of that's impossible in reality, but it'll work in his favor regardless. He even got the ability to surgically implant others' souls into him, which allowed him to outsmart Satan and get a few extra decades alive until the latter thinks up a way to outsmart him then.
• A non-comedic example occurs in FEAR 2: Project Origin, while Michael Beckett is undergoing surgery to awaken his Harbinger powers, he has a hallucination in which demonic creatures in surgical uniforms claw and hack at his flesh.
• Borderlands: Doctor Zed, a recurring character, frequently displays why he lacks a medical license.
  • In Borderlands, the first time players see him, Zed's giving a malevolent look to a fellow who is either not long for the world or already expired... and his introduction pauses juuust as he's about to violently swing a buzz axe (a buzz saw crossbred with a fire axe, and the main weapon of the game's Psycho enemies) and carve his victim like an ugly, graying turkey. It's heavily implied that Zed's idea of general medical care isn't any better and outright explicit that he's not even a doctor, especially after he sends players out on a Fetch Quest to repair the medical vending machine.
    Zed: Who needs a real doctor when you got my machines and their scary needles?
  • In Borderlands 2, he repeats the intro from the previous game, except this time he drives a needle into a man's sternum by slamming it in. In full view of the camera. He then asks the protagonists (crazy gun-toting badasses) to assist in the operation to mend a captured Hyperion engineer's lungs. He asks the player to carefully make a small incision below the sternum, and pressing the button to "Perform surgery" causes you to do your melee attack, which includes things like slashing the man in the chest with a bladed melee weapon, or punching his chest open. The same task only requires you to damage him, so it's perfectly valid to blow up the patient with a grenade. You can also hop on the guy's body, which somehow achieves the same effect thanks to the Scratch Damage dealt by jumping on enemies.
    Zed: Eh, close enough.
• The freeware Flash Dark Cut series features this trope as a deliberate Darker and Edgier version of Trauma Center. Pretty much every operation is a medieval, battlefield, or otherwise non-standard surgery center Played for Drama with lots of grit and blood and creepiness.
• The game Surgeon Simulator 2013 can be described as "QWOP gets his medical license". And it is just as darkly hilarious as it sounds. Even if the patient has their lungs on the floor, their ribcage smashed beyond repair, and about five milliliters of blood left, as long as you fulfill the given objective the operation will end successfully.
  "Looks fine to me, I'm sure he'll live..."
  • It has been given a DLC in the form of a 'level' where you play the Medic performing his first Ubercharge heart transplant, as seen in Meet the Medic. He still controls like a drunk on amphetamines. Two memetic meatgrinder surgeons for the price of one!
• Fallout 3: When Vault 101's Mr. Handy is assigned to be the vault's doctor, he ends up amputating a patient's leg instead of treating her sprained big toe (on the opposite foot), killing her. In Point Lookout, the Lone Wanderer undergoes a lobotomy at the hands of a Back-Alley Doctor while under the influence of psychedelics.
  • While helping Argyll, the Boomers' doctor in Fallout: New Vegas, a low-Intelligence character has the option to "CHOP CHOP CHOP" a patient, which saves them through "dumb luck".
  • Also in New Vegas, one of the quests, 'Et Tumor, Brute?', requires removal of Caesar's brain tumor. You can do it if you have a Medicine Skill of at least 75 and acquire a pretty expensive quest item plus one very useful rare item (especially on Hardcore mode)... or just have a Luck at 9, at which moment the Courier just wings it.
    Vulpes: That was... incredible. How did you do that?
    Courier: I have no idea whatsoever.
  • Implied in a loading screen for Fallout 4, where the loading tip directing players to the Mega Surgery Center in Diamond City if they want to redo their character's appearance is accompanied by an image of a bladed aluminum baseball bat◊.
• The Stroggification process in Quake IV includes the victim's legs being amputated with a giant buzzsaw, needles thrust into them from a full meter away and riveting of the new body parts not unlike what's seen at a car factory, culminating in the implantation of a neurocyte in the victim's brain, apparently by punching it through the forehead. The most vaguely hygienic part of it is the cauterization of these wounds. Nonetheless, it leaves corporal Matthew Kane 40% faster and 25% tougher than when he came in, as well as capable of understanding the Wingdinglish that is the Strogg language despite his neurocyte not being activated.
• In Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work, Passionate Patti gets this treatment with a drill during a Tracking Device implantation.
• Played for Drama in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, where the surgery to extract Paz's stomach bomb is pretty much a matter of cutting her open and digging around in her intestines while Big Boss holds her down, all while Paz is fully conscious and screaming her lungs out. It's actually a justified case since the bomb is on a timer and they're performing it in a moving helicopter near an enemy base, so they simply don't have the time for a legitimate surgery or the luxury of being able to just take cover in case it goes off. They get that bomb out, only to find a second bomb too late to do anything about it.
• Dungeon Munchies has "Forced Surgery," a part of your "health plan" from your boss, Simmer. Your zombie player character is operated on by a fellow undead "employee," attaching brand new feet under your own that grants permanent Double Jump; an extra pair of smaller arms around your waist for climbing; and later on, a new butt with a compressed-air tank built in. While the operations themselves are not shown, you do see the new parts being grafted on you, and all the blood splatter and the literal back-alley set-up aren't very pleasant, either.
• VGA Miner: Asking for a surgery at the hospital does heal you slightly, even though Woody's (the surgeon's) razor is rusty.
• Darkest Dungeon: While the medical camping skills work, at least unless the character is Afflicted and doesn't cooperate, some of the dialogue accompanying their use is...less than encouraging. In the Warrens there may even be a meatgrinder present (although it's more likely to be the cause for the treatment than the methodology).
  Occultist: Anatomy is hardly my specialty, I'll admit.
  Hellion: That's a bad cut. Let me lick it clean.
  Grave Robber: Lucky thing for you I have dabbled in crochet.
  Highwayman: Did I wash this needle? Well, too late now.
  Abomination: I know just enough to be dangerous, now keep still.
  Hellion again: I have packed your wounds with dung. Feel better?
• The Surge opens with a paraplegic named Warren undergoing an automated surgery to get a rig that will allow him to walk again for his new job at CREO. Everything seems fine, and Warren looks a bit nervous but otherwise calm. His body is scanned... and then we hear "Patient sedated", but Warren is still awake. What ensues is a nightmarish sequence where the various plates and tubes of his exoskeleton get bolted and screwed onto his body, blood gushing from the screwholes, all while Warren screams in pure agony. Other audio diaries that he finds show he's not the only one this happened to, and it continued in its sequel, The Surge 2.
• Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: Ethan Winters gets his left hand cut off with a chainsaw very early on, and gets it stapled back on. The only reason it still functions as well as it did before it was cut off is because Ethan's mold infection gives him accelerated healing.
• Space Station 13: A patient can come in after being attacked with a chainsaw, and they can be fixed with nothing but a bedsheet as surgical drapes, a shard of glass as a scalpel, a coil of electrical wiring to tie together their wounds, and a cigarette lighter to cauterize them once the surgery is done. Even when proper surgical tools are used, anesthetic is completely ignored.

Web Animation

• Doctor Lollipop performs surgery on the raptor by having a woodsman perform the incision with an axe, and then kicking the raptor's Talking Animal filled belly.

Webcomics

• When Tavros in Homestuck gets bionic legs, the first step is removing his old ones. His friend Kanaya Maryam takes care of this. With her chainsaw.
• In The Last Days of Foxhound during the Normandy invasion The Boss (then known a The Joy) went into labor while on the battlefield and performed a c-section on herself. She and the baby were both fine, while the baby's father The Sorrow passed out pretty much immediately when she made the first cut.
• Awful Hospital: Head surgeon Circula Tori operates on Fern with a spork and drops her ID card into her chest cavity... but nonetheless restores her to life. In an unusually literal example, she once does so after Fern falls into a living meat grinder. Except it wasn't really Tori, it was her fellow surgeons Scissie and Scissane.
• Deep Rise: Deep Nobles are a walking combination of meat grinders, eldritch tentacles, and genius bioengineers. Any surgery they perform is almost guaranteed to maximize invasive pain and grotesque assimilation. On the plus side, they've developed cures to world hunger and aging.
• Schlock Mercenary: Neeka is an Esspererin, a species renowned for their engineering abilities. She is a rarity in that she chose to be a field medic instead. You know how mechanics fix cars - by ripping out the damaged part, fiddling with it, then bolting it back in? Neeka does that to organs and limbs. The surgery always occurs off-panel, but is typically accompanied by blood-spattered speech bubbles, shocked or disgusted onlookers, and occasionally the screams of unsuspecting "patients" who want to know where she is going with their leg. She's an absolute miracle worker, but she's been mistaken for an automated blender more than once.
  Chelle: At least we got her to start offering anesthetic.
• Level 30 Psychiatry, being a video game Massive Multiplayer Crossover, has both the Medic and the surgeon. The Medic gets stopped before he can start the surgery because he was hamming it up, but the surgeon gets a crack at the patient and it goes about as well as it does in Surgeon Simulator. The results are covered by a Gory Discretion Shot, but a horrified Roll says she's seen cleaner kills in Manhunt.

Web Original

• Played for Laughs in the Beyond the Press channel video "Wife vs. husband air cannon challenge"- the challenge in question was to shoot a secondhand clothing mannequin affectionately named Johnny using the aforementioned homemade air cannon. When Lauri lands a hit on Johnny with a zucchini halfway through the video, Johnny's left arm and right hand pop off, so his wife repairs him using duct tape and they go back to shooting him.
  Lauri: "First aid, Finnish way."
• Deliberately invoked by a cancer patient in this Not Always Friendly story, as part of his quest to make the nurses laugh every time he goes in for radiation treatment.
• As shown in "I Made My Viewers Perform Real Surgery", streamer PointCrow had his chat perform medical procedures on a dummy. In classic "Twitch Plays" fashion, chat messages were used to control a robot equipped with various surgical tools. Highlights include the use of Elmer's glue to close wounds, and repeated attempts to stab the patient in the balls.

Western Animation

• Courage the Cowardly Dog: In the episode "The Transplant," after Eustace twists his spine falling off of a roof, he gets a "disk transplant" from Dr. Vindaloo, using the kangaroo monster bone Courage dug up. Said transplant involves the doctor literally hammering the bone into Eustace's body with a mallet, and then duct-taping it in place, all while Eustace is fully conscious.
  Eustace: Durn doctor don't know what he's doin'!
• Used in Cow and Chicken for plastic surgery during a plastic surgery contest.
• Also used for amateur plastic surgery in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Super Model".
• In the Family Guy episode "American Giggo-lo", Brian suffers a hernia attack. Because it's too late, Stewie decides to operate on him. But because he's a baby with little-to-no medical experience, Stewie has to look up how to perform a hernia surgery on Brian's phone. It goes about as well as you'd expect it to.
• Futurama:
  • Professor Farnsworth decides the best way to carry out Bender's delicate gender reassignment is with a sledgehammer. Even with the latter being a robot, it was still a dangerous tool to use.
  • This is also what happens when you see Zoidberg for treatment. Although it's shown that he's actually a very good doctor when it comes to Bizarre Alien Biology, it's just that, unfortunately, human anatomy is something he doesn't have nailed down just yet. He is, however, somewhat capable at reattaching severed limbs. Even if he was the one who severed them in the first place. And if the limb in question ends up on the wrong side.
  • In the episode “Roswell That Ends Well”, the government gives an Alien Autopsy to a still-conscious Zoidberg. He’s very nonchalant about being dissected, and even offers one of his hearts to them since he’s got four.
• In Inside Job (2021), Brett and Glenn's face change operation performed by Andre is a horrible failure. The brain change operation, however...
• Kaeloo:
  • Stumpy winds up being a victim of this in Episode 78 when Olaf tries to turn him into a cyborg by giving him surgery with no anesthetic using a drill and a chainsaw. Miraculously, he survives it, but his cyborganic implants suck. Fortunately, Negative Continuity has him back to normal by the next episode.
  • Stumpy again winds up being a victim of this when he asks Mr. Cat to help him when he has a toothache. Mr. Cat uses a chainsaw, a jackhammer, and other things and somehow turns Stumpy's head into a fire extinguisher. Stumpy is back to normal in a few minutes.
• This trope was the subject of the first skit of the Madballs episode "Gross Jokes", where Screamin' Meemie plays an incompetent surgeon named Dr. Ghastly and there are many jokes revolving around him having no idea what he's doing, such as going through with the surgery even though no one is certain if the patient has been anesthetized, Slobulus remarking that Dr. Ghastly kills most of his patients, and Dr. Ghastly coming to the conclusion that the patient's problem can be solved by removing his brain.
• The Simpsons
  • Dr. Nick Riviera is basically the living avatar of this trope. He was once brought before a malpractice committee for over 100 heinous charges, including performing surgery with a knife and fork from a seafood restaurant ("But I cleaned them with my napkin!")
    • There's also his old friend Mr. McGreg, with a leg for an arm, and an arm for a leg.
  • Moe is also revealed to be an unlicensed and unhygienic surgeon in one episode.
• Doctor Barber is never shown performing such surgeries onscreen (for obvious reasons), but don't think that'll stop The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack from reminding you as often as humanly possible that this is what he — a 19th century doctor/barber — does for a living. It's all Played for Laughs, of course.
• Pretty much any surgery depicted in South Park is guaranteed to be this. Besides the Kenny example listed above in Bigger, Longer & Uncut, examples include the gruesome surgeries the patients are subjected to in "Cartman's Mom is Still a Dirty Slut", the boy's bootleg liposuction on a fat Butters (sucking the fat out into a bucket, when all of a sudden it and blood start violently painting Butters' house) in "Jared Has Aides", Wendy getting breast implants (consisting of cutting/ripping open her armpit and then having the implant violently shoved in, squirting gallons of Wendy's blood everywhere) in "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society. But the crowner would be "Mr Garrison's Fancy New Vagina", depicting Mr. Garrison having a sex change by way of live action footage of an animal being neutered...and he's not sedated through the procedure!!
• Transformers: Prime: Knock Out usually goes a more painless route (as painless as a Decepticon opts to be anyway), and his surgically inserting a new T-cog into Starscream went off without a hitch. However when Megatron asks him to graft a new arm onto him in his pursuit of power, Knock Out wants to put him in stasis, only for Megatron to inform Knock Out that he wishes to be awake to witness it. Knock Out just shrugs, whips out his buzz saw and starts cutting away.
• American Dad!: Stan's horrific attempt to reconstruct Hayley's face in her sleep in "The Mural of the Story".
• The times Krieger is depicted performing surgery in Archer are shown to be a gruesome affair. The least of which is that he doesn't sterilize the environment, doesn't know the names of any of the parts he's operating on (and in fact still follows Humorism) and has assistants who know even less than him, who often misplace their beers within the patients.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In the episode "Dying For Pie", SpongeBob "performs" open-heart surgery on Squidward by opening his chest cavity and poking his heart with his finger. This causes blood to come squirting out, though Squidward is alive and well in the next scene.
  • The episode “Code Yellow” is about SpongeBob being mistaken for a surgeon. This eventually leads to him giving Squidward a nose job. Although Squidward is put under anesthetics, the procedure itself involves SpongeBob violently chopping up his limbs over and over again until he gets it right. Eventually SpongeBob does succeed… but it comes at the cost of all of Squidward’s limbs.
• In the Roger Rabbit Short "Tummy Trouble", Roger is sent to the ER by mistake and is about to be operated on with a chainsaw when the twelve-o'clock whistle sounds and the surgeons pause for lunch. Roger also administers his own anesthetic by Hyperspace Mallet.

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