Index · Topic Index
Topic Index
Nine numbered topics covering the history of anaesthesia, the agents, the instruments, the argument about mechanism, and pain and consciousness as scientific problems.
The nine topics
The index is numbered rather than chronological. Topics 01 and 02 are historical and are the natural place to start. Topic 03 and its detail page treat the substances themselves. Topic 04 follows the instruments. Topics 05 to 07 are the scientific problems, and are the hardest of the nine. Topics 08 and 09 are about the field as a field: how it became one and how it produces its knowledge.
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.
Sections that run across all of them
- Nitrous oxide, a worked example of a single agent's route from laboratory preparation to established use.
- The chronology, a dated spine running from 1540 to 1984.
- Figures in the record, the historical contributors and what each is credited with.
- Reading, the landmark publications and the kinds of source the subject rests on.
Dates and terms this page turns on
- Numbered topics
- Nine
- Historical topics
- 01, 02 and 08
- Scientific topics
- 05, 06 and 07
- Detail page
- Nitrous oxide, under topic 03
- Chronology span
- 1540 to 1984
- Figures listed
- 23