Index · Reading
Reading
Landmark publications in the history and science of anaesthesia, listed bibliographically, with a description of the kinds of source the subject rests on.
Landmark publications
The list below is bibliographic. It records what each publication is and when it appeared, and makes no judgement about which are worth anyone's time. Most of the nineteenth-century items are long out of copyright and can be read in full through the major digitised library collections.
Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide 1800
Humphry Davy. The long account of the gas's preparation and effects, including the remark about surgical operations.
A Letter on Suspended Animation 1824
Henry Hill Hickman. The argument that insensibility could be produced deliberately, written before any agent was in use.
Account of a New Anaesthetic Agent 1847
James Young Simpson. The short report that introduced chloroform to the profession.
On the Inhalation of the Vapour of Ether in Surgical Operations 1847
John Snow. The first systematic treatment of administration, including the design of a calibrated inhaler.
On Chloroform and Other Anaesthetics: Their Action and Administration 1858
John Snow. Published after its author's death, and the fullest nineteenth-century statement of the subject.
Studien uber die Narkose 1901
Charles Ernest Overton. The monograph that set out the correlation between lipid solubility and anaesthetic potency.
Uber das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen 1929
Hans Berger. The paper reporting electrical activity recorded from the human scalp.
Pain Mechanisms: A New Theory 1965
Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall. The Science paper proposing gate control, and the starting point for most later work on modulation.
Do General Anaesthetics Act by Competitive Binding to Specific Receptors? 1984
Nicholas Franks and William Lieb. The Nature paper reporting anaesthetic inhibition of a soluble protein in the absence of any membrane.
The kinds of source the subject rests on
Primary reports
The original papers and letters in which a method or an agent was first described. Most nineteenth-century material is out of copyright and freely readable.
Institutional records
Case books, operating registers and anaesthetic charts, which often contradict the tidy narrative of the published reports.
Society and journal archives
The proceedings and journals that appeared once the work had a professional literature of its own, from the 1890s onward.
Laboratory literature
Physical chemistry, pharmacology and neurophysiology papers, which is where the questions about mechanism are actually settled or left open.
Historical scholarship
Secondary work that establishes dates, corrects attributions and traces how the priority disputes were argued.
A note on reading the older literature
Two habits make the historical material much easier to use. The first is to check what a word meant at the time: the name of the state was coined in 1846 and the name of the work settled much later and still differs between countries, so the same term does not always denote the same thing across sources. The second is to distinguish what an author observed from what he inferred, which in the nineteenth-century texts is often not signposted at all and has to be worked out from the structure of the argument.
Dates and terms this page turns on
- Publications listed
- 9
- Earliest
- 1800
- Latest
- 1984
- Source categories described
- 5
- Copyright status of most items
- Long out of copyright
- Listing rule
- Bibliographic only, with no assessment