The History and Science of Anaesthesia
This is a reference index on anaesthesia as a subject of study: where its agents came from, how the state it produces came to be measured, and what is and is not settled about how it works.
Anaesthesia is unusual among scientific subjects in having a date. Before the autumn of 1846 an operation was something endured; within a year of it, insensibility was routine across two continents. What makes the subject worth reading about is not the drama of that change but everything it exposed afterwards: that the agents had been available for decades, that nobody could say how they worked, and that a state which abolishes experience turns out to be one of the few experimental handles anyone has on consciousness itself.
The nine topics below run from surgery before 1846 through the agents, the instruments, the mechanistic argument, and the two hard scientific problems the field sits on top of. Everything here is historical and explanatory. There is no clinical, dosing or diagnostic material of any kind, and none is intended.
The latest file
Topic index
Nine numbered topics, each a self-contained account with its own dates, figures and further reading. They can be read in order or separately.
Why speed was the governing surgical virtue, and why insensibility took so long to arrive.
The twelve months between 1846 and 1847 in which the operating room changed.
How the substances used to produce insensibility entered the record as chemistry first.
The slow accumulation of instruments that replaced impression with measurement.
How Anaesthetics Are Thought to Work
Lipid theory, the Meyer-Overton correlation, its anomalies, and the turn to proteins.
Specificity, pattern and gate control, and the distance between injury and experience.
Consciousness and Its Reversible Loss
What a reversible loss of awareness offers experiment, and what it leaves unsettled.
How a delegated task acquired a literature, societies, journals and a name.
The methods that produce knowledge about anaesthesia, and how that knowledge is written down.
Dates in the record
The first eight entries of the chronology. Each links to the topic that carries the detail; the full list runs from 1540 to 1984.
Sweet oil of vitriol described
Valerius Cordus records the preparation of the liquid later called ether; its effect on animals is noticed but not pursued.
Joseph Priestley produces the gas during his survey of newly isolated airs.
The book describes the gas at length and remarks that it might be used during surgical operations.
Hickman argues for suspended animation
A letter proposes that insensibility could be induced deliberately to permit painless surgery.
Crawford Long removes a neck tumour under ether; the case is not published for seven years.
Nitrous oxide used for a dental extraction
Horace Wells has his own tooth removed under the gas after seeing an exhibition of its effects.
Wells attempts a public demonstration in Boston; the patient cries out and the method is dismissed.
The Boston ether demonstration
On 16 October, ether is administered before an operation performed by John Collins Warren; the report circulates within weeks.
Figures in the record
Historical figures the literature credits with a specific contribution, listed with their working years. These are people in the history of the subject; the directory names nobody connected with this site, and carries no portraits or quotations.
Joseph Priestley 1733-1804
Prepared nitrous oxide in 1772 during his work isolating and describing new airs.
Humphry Davy 1778-1829
Published Researches, Chemical and Philosophical in 1800, and noted in it that nitrous oxide might be used during surgical operations.
Henry Hill Hickman 1800-1830
Argued in 1824 that suspended animation induced by carbon dioxide could make an operation painless; his proposals were not taken up in his lifetime.
Crawford Williamson Long 1815-1878
Used ether to remove a neck tumour in March 1842, but did not publish the case until 1849.
Horace Wells 1815-1848
Had a tooth extracted under nitrous oxide in December 1844, then failed to reproduce the effect in a public demonstration weeks later.
William Thomas Green Morton 1819-1868
Administered ether at the public demonstration of 16 October 1846, the case usually treated as the start of the surgical record.
Reference material
Landmark publications in the subject, most of them long out of copyright and freely readable, listed bibliographically without comment on their merits.
- Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide · Humphry Davy, 1800
- A Letter on Suspended Animation · Henry Hill Hickman, 1824
- Account of a New Anaesthetic Agent · James Young Simpson, 1847
- On the Inhalation of the Vapour of Ether in Surgical Operations · John Snow, 1847
- On Chloroform and Other Anaesthetics: Their Action and Administration · John Snow, 1858
The full reading list and the kinds of sources the subject rests on
Scope of this index
This site covers anaesthesia strictly as history and science: the origin of the agents, the development of measurement, the argument about mechanism, and pain and consciousness as scientific problems. It does not cover clinical practice, and nothing here is guidance for anyone.
Topics carry two-digit index numbers which are fixed and are used throughout the site, in the breadcrumbs and in the left-hand rail, so a topic can be referred to by number alone. Sections that are not numbered, such as the chronology and the reading list, run across all nine topics rather than belonging to any one of them.