General Anaesthesia 1842 – Relief from Torture

Although it is impossible to forget the horrifying realities of surgery before anaesthesia, in our modern world we probably do. 

The celebrated 19th-century novelist and playwright Fanny Burney had to endure the pain of a mastectomy (breast cancer surgery) with only a glass of wine, while seven men arranged around the operating table held her down. Burney described those days as follows: 

"When the dreadful steel (scalpel) first entered the breast – cutting veins, arteries, flesh and nerves at the same time – I began to scream, and my screams continued without interruption throughout the cutting. Then, when I felt the knife sliding over the breastbone, I realised that the scraping had begun. The whole process was literally torture, and I could do nothing but scream."

General anaesthesia is an unconscious state in which drugs are used to help a patient undergo surgery without pain. Early forms of anaesthesia date back to prehistoric times in the form of opium. Inca shamans used coca leaves to numb a particular area of the body locally. However, the discovery of general anaesthesia suitable for modern operations is usually attributed to three Americans: physician Crawford W. Long and dentists Horace Wells and William Morton. 

• In 1842, Long removed a cyst from his patient's neck while the patient inhaled ether.
• In 1844, Wells extracted many teeth using what was commonly known as "laughing gas", or nitrous oxide.
• Morton became famous and made newspaper headlines after a public demonstration in 1846 in which he assisted a surgeon who used ether to remove a tumour from a patient's jaw. In 1847, chloroform was also used, but it carried greater risks than ether. After Morton's procedures, the use of anaesthetics began to spread rapidly. 

In 1847, Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach, a pioneer of plastic surgery, wrote: 

"The wonderful dream that pain has been taken from us has become reality. Pain is the highest consciousness of our earthly existence, as well as the clearest sensation of how far our bodies are from perfection. Pain must now bow before the power of ether vapour discovered by humankind."

Description of the article image: The use of anaesthetic agents

Historical figures mentioned in the article: Frances Burney (1752–1840), Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach (1795–1847), Crawford Williamson Long (1815–1878), Horace Wells (1815–1848), William Thomas Green Morton (1819–1868)

• Previous topic: Observing Alexis Martin's Stomach 1833
• Next topic: The Sanitary Conditions of the English Working Class 1842 – The Public Health Act