|
|
Ooh, aah, ouch! Don’t we say at least one of these when in pain?
Don’t we try and avoid injections, if we can help it? Don’t we all
shrink away from the dentist’s chair, mortally afraid of an
anticipated pain? Can you imagine what it must have been like to get
operated, before anesthesia was discovered by scientists?
Until the discovery of anesthesia, surgery was an ordeal for both
the patient and the surgeon. Surgeons worked at breakneck speed to
get in and out of the patient’s body as quickly as possible. For
their part, some patients used alcohol or opium to lessen the pain,
while others took to reciting verses or hymns. Passing out
was considered a blessing. In China, practitioners used to first
give a patient acupuncture in the area, in order to achieve an
anesthetic effect. The advent of surgical anesthesia changed all
this, permitting surgeons to work at a slower, more careful pace. |
|
|
The story of surgical anesthesia begins in
1275 when a Spaniard, Lullius, discovered ether, an organic solvent;
however, its anesthetic properties were unknown. In the early
1800s, it is said that people, who wanted make themselves high, used
to inhale ether at parties. Ether was therefore in great demand at
parties. A physician in Jefferson, Georgia, used to frequently
prepare ether at the request of his friends. One evening, he inhaled
ether at a so-called ether frolic party and badly bruised himself
while he was high. Yet, the physician, whose name was Long, noticed
that he felt no pain.
Now Long needed to experiment and prove the point. Around the same
time, a friend, who had two cysts in his neck, was advised to
undergo surgery. He was terrified at the prospect of surgery. Long
convinced the friend, James Venable, to try ether. On March 30,
1842, Venable used ether before surgery and the ether made him
unconscious. The experiment was a success; Venable was amazed to
notice that he remembered no pain at all. The operation too had been
a success. In the next four years, Long successfully used ether as
anesthesia on eight patients.
However, in 1842, Long’s secret was “stolen” by a physician Charles
Jackson and a dentist, William Morton. They somehow learned what
Long was doing with ether, possibly when on a visit to Jefferson. On
October 16, 1846, the dentist Morton used ether to anaesthetize two
of his patients at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, in front
of an audience of famous surgeons. The results were published, and
anesthesia was soon introduced to the entire world. Long received
no credit for the discovery.
Long, Jackson, Morton and many others claimed to have made the
discovery of surgical anesthesia and there followed bitter quarrels
over the issue. The Congress of the United States took up the matter
and debated it for sixteen years, without ever deciding who first
introduced ether as an anesthetic procedure. The public at large,
however, gained immensely from the discovery. The use of anesthesia
developed rapidly. In the years that followed, new anesthetic
agents were discovered by scientists and they also developed better
methods of administering anesthetic gases. Eventually, they
eventually discovered local anesthesia. |
