Index · Figures in the Record
Figures in the Record
A directory of the historical figures credited in the record of anaesthesia, with working years and the specific contribution attributed to each.
Historical contributors
These are figures in the published history of the subject, listed with their working years and the single contribution the literature credits to each. All are historical, and the entries are limited to what the record supports: no portraits, no quotations, and no assessment of anybody's character or standing.
Attribution in this subject is unusually contested. The priority disputes that followed 1846 ran for decades and were argued in print by people with a direct interest in the outcome, and several of the conventional attributions were established less by evidence than by persistence. Where credit is genuinely divided, the entry says what was done rather than who was first.
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.
John Collins Warren 1778-1856
Performed the operation at the October 1846 demonstration and confirmed afterwards that the patient had not felt the knife.
Charles Thomas Jackson 1805-1880
Claimed the discovery of etherisation against Morton, one of several disputes that occupied the following decades.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809-1894
Proposed the term anaesthesia for the new state in a letter written in November 1846.
Robert Liston 1794-1847
Carried out an amputation under ether in London in December 1846, one of the first European operations using the method.
James Young Simpson 1811-1870
Introduced chloroform as an inhalational agent in Edinburgh in November 1847 after testing candidate liquids on himself and his colleagues.
John Snow 1813-1858
Wrote the first systematic accounts of etherisation and chloroform, designed a calibrated inhaler, and treated administration as a measurable process.
Carl Koller 1857-1944
Demonstrated in 1884 that cocaine applied to the eye produced local insensibility, opening the separate history of local anaesthesia.
August Bier 1861-1949
Reported spinal anaesthesia in 1898, having tested the technique on himself and an assistant.
Harvey Cushing 1869-1939
Introduced, with Ernest Codman, the practice of charting pulse and respiration through an operation, and brought blood-pressure measurement into the operating room.
Willem Einthoven 1860-1927
Developed the string galvanometer at the turn of the twentieth century, making the electrocardiogram a practical recording.
Arthur Guedel 1883-1956
Published a graded description of the successive stages of ether anaesthesia, which gave observers a shared vocabulary for depth.
Harold Griffith 1894-1985
Reported the use of curare during anaesthesia in 1942, separating muscular relaxation from depth for the first time.
Charles Suckling 1920-2013
Designed halothane in the early 1950s by reasoning from the properties a stable non-flammable agent would need.
Hans Berger 1873-1941
Recorded the human electroencephalogram and published it in 1929, providing the signal later used to study anaesthetic depth.
Ronald Melzack 1929-2019
Co-authored the gate control theory of pain in 1965 and later worked on phantom limb phenomena.
Patrick David Wall 1925-2001
Co-authored the gate control theory of pain and argued through his career that pain is an output rather than a measurement of damage.
Takuo Aoyagi 1936-2020
Worked out in the early 1970s that the pulsatile component of transmitted light could be used to read arterial oxygen saturation.
Dates and terms this page turns on
- Entries listed
- 23
- Earliest working years
- From 1733
- Range covered
- Eighteenth to twentieth century
- Excluded
- Portraits, quotations and living people
- Contested area
- Priority for etherisation, 1846 onward
- Attribution rule
- What was done, not who claimed it first