The History of Anesthesia

The Long Struggle to Create Pain-Killers

Feb 3, 2008 Isaac M. McPhee

While human beings have been aware of certain methods of "dulling pain" for nearly two thousand years, only recently was this science mastered.

Anyone who has ever had a their tonsils removed or had open heart surgery understands the value of anesthetics. Actually, a better way of saying this is that anyone who has ever had their tonsils removed or had open heart surgery while remaining awake and unsedated truly understands the value of anesthetics.

The Origins of Anesthetics

Who is there to thank for such a revolutionary invention? Unfortunately, this is not entirely certain. It is known that certain types of natural anesthetics, such as opium and mandrake (a plant in the nightshade family) were used as early as A.D. 70 by an early Roman physician and botanist named Pedanius Dioscorides, and while his form of anesthetics would probably be seen as somewhat illegal these days, and quite expensive, they were surely effective in helping to relieve the pain and suffering of his patients. In China, as well, there is a long history of using acupuncture and extreme cold to deaden the nerves of a certain area in order to numb a patient for medical procedures. And of course throughout the world the effects of alcohol have always been known to be useful for these purposes as well.

So anesthetics are not really all that new to the world. This being said, most people have heard horror stories about complicated dental procedures or surgeries being performed without anesthetics, even in the not-so-distant past; soldiers at war having limbs amputated while fully awake and conscious of the pain with naught but a rag to bite down on?

The question that should be asked is this: If humans have had knowledge of even primitive anaesthetics for nearly two thousand years, doesn't it stand to reason that at least within the last five hundred such treatments should have become universal? It makes one wonder what, if anything, humanity was doing during this vast period of time...

The Birth of Modern Pain-Killers

It was not until the eighteenth century that anesthetics took any further leaps forward. It was then that several notable men finally began to understand that modern chemical anesthetics were the wave of the medical future. British chemist Humphrey Davy first experimented with Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas) in 1795, though the first painless tooth extraction using the substance didn't occur until 1844. The first medical operation to use a modern chemical anesthesia successfully was in 1842, by Dr. Crawford Williamson Long, using Diethyl Ether (which worked well, though was promptly replaced by chloroform in 1847, which wasn't quite as prone to spontaneous combustion, nor did it make patients vomit as frequently).

It was in 1846 that the poet/physician Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr. proposed in a letter that such agents which produce painless medical procedures be called anesthetics, from a combination of the Greek words an (an), meaning not, or without, and aesthetos (aesqetos) meaning to feel, or perceive.

After general anesthetics (those which put the entire body to sleep) had become functional and had gone into general medical practice, the attention of the medical community seemed to turn to local anesthetics, which would numb only a specific part of the body, and, hopefully, with fewer potential side effects. Cocaine was first suggested for such a use by Sigmund Freud in 1884 (before that there were only those primitive treatments previously discussed, such as acupuncture or extreme cold).

From this point, many other local anesthetics (safer than cocaine, though most of which end in the suffix -aine, which refers to such local anesthetics as novacaine) were created for very specific purposes, such as for oral surgery or as epidurals during childbirth. Unfortunately, most local anesthetics share the property of being toxic to both the heart and the brain, so their use must be very well-regulated, for if they were to accidentally find their way into either of these regions, the results would not be pretty.

Today, humans are fortunate enough to live in a time where there are doctors (anesthesiologists) whose sole devotion is to the science of helping people live lives with as little pain as possible. With this in mind, despite the importance of heart surgeons, brain surgeons and pediatricians, perhaps there isn’t a more noble medical professional than an anesthesiologist – probably the most heroic form of doctor there is.

God bless them.

References:

Anesthesia History.

Anesthesia and Pain History Resources on the Internet.

The copyright of the article The History of Anesthesia in General Medicine is owned by Isaac M. McPhee. Permission to republish The History of Anesthesia in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.