Anesthesiology in history

The true meaning of Anesthesia is ‘insensitive to pain’. Anesthesiology is a knowledge or study how to have a condition of having sensation blocked. Other definition is “reversible lack of awareness”. This will allow patients to undergo surgery and procedures without feel pain.

In ancient Incas, shaman coked up chewed coca leaves and drilled holes in the heads of their patients while splitting into the wounds they’d inflicted.

Dated in 4200 BC, Sumerian people used opium poppies as herbal remedy. Opium then was introduced to China in 330 BC and India in 600 BC.

Assyrian and Egyptian physicians obtained artificial sleep for their patient by quickly compressing the Carotid vessels of their neck. Pictographs from 3000 to 2500 BC show a surgeon compressing a nerve in a patient’s antecubital fossa while operating on the patient’s hand.

This practice was followed as well by the Greek physicians.

Dioscorides, a Greek physician from the first century AD, commented on the analgesia of madragora, a drug prepared from the bark and leaves of the mandrake plant. He observed that the plant could be used to produce anesthesia.

Arab translation of the Greek medicine helped to make Islamic physicians supreme in the middle ages. 

Abulcasis and Avicenna wrote about anesthesia in their book: Al-Tasrif and The Canon of Medicine. Baghdad at that time became the world’s leading medical and drug center.

With the skill of the Arab Alchemists, the art of drug making began to evolve into the science of Pharmacology. Western physicians emerging from the Middle Ages found the Arab pharmacopoeia, in which a list of medicinal plants composed the anesthetic armamentarium.

In the 17th century, Marco Aurelio Severino described the technique of ‘refrigeration anesthesia’ in which snow was placed in parallel line across the incisional plane such that the surgical site became insensate within minutes.

The technique never became widely used likely because of the challenge of maintaining stores of snow year-round.

Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) discovered oxygen in 1774 and Lavoisier called this gas oxygen and later he discovered Nitrous Oxide. British Chemist Humphrey Davy in 1799 worked on this nitrous oxide and documented the analgesic efficacy of this gas and called it as laughing gas. The discovery was ignored until Connecticut dentist Horace Wells began to experiment using nitrous oxide as an anesthetic during tooth surgery.

General anesthesia was introduced in 1846 and became popular with patients because it was such an improvement over restraints, alcohol, opium or Mesmeric trance. In that year, dentist, William Thomas Green Morton performed the first public demonstration of diethyl ether (then called sulfuric ether) as an anesthetic agent, for a patient undergoing an excision of a vascular tumor from his neck.

This demonstration occurred at the Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846 inside what is known to date as the ‘Ether Dome’.

Actually, the person who gave the first anesthetic was Dr Crawford Long in Jefferson, Georgia in 1842. However, his report of his activities was delayed until 1849.

Chloroform was introduced as a surgical anesthetic by Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson in 1847. Although it can eased pain of labor, chloroform had higher risks than those associated with ether.

The first effective local anesthetic was cocaine. Isolated in 1859, it was first used by Carl Koller, at the suggestion of Sigmund Freud, in ophthalmic surgery in 1884.

Chemical substance that has a morphine-like action, Opioids was first used by Racoviceanu-Piteşti, who reported his work in 1901.
Anesthesiology in history