Many produced forms of anesthesia with primitive means,
including alcohol, herbs, and alkaloids.
Early Arab surgeons mixed opium with poisons
from mandrake, hemlock, ivy, and other stuff.
Hugh of Lucca and his son Theodoric used similar mixtures
as an inhaled anesthetic in the thirteenth century.
People enjoyed ether and nitrous oxide gases recreationally
long before they were used to produce anesthesia.
Doctors and dentists in the United States were the first
to operate with patients under ether or nitrous oxide.
Crawford Long excised two small tumors from the neck
of James Venable under ether, without pain, in 1842.
Horace Wells made the first public demonstration
operating with the patient under nitrous oxide in 1845,
and the dentist William T. G. Morton
demonstrated painless surgery using diethyl ether in 1846,
whereupon Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior named the procedure
an anesthetic and the state that it produced anesthesia.
Theories of action
For many years, erroneous theories
of how general anesthetics work
have persisted because scientists
didn’t know how nerve cells work.
One modern theory depends on mechanistic
and thermodynamic models of how the drug
interacts with lipid layers and ion channels
of nerve cells.
Another theory asserts that the drugs
inhibit luciferase proteins in the ion channels;
however, anaesthetic-protein interactions
remain mysterious.
Cartoon anesthetics
Shock is an anesthetic,
or at least that’s one way to explain it,
even though it’s useless
as a medical procedure.
So is a great blow on the skull
with a rubber hammer.
Early doctors, tempted by the simplicity
of the rubber hammer procedure,
didn’t understand its long-term effects.
Similar to the offer in jest
to help with the pain of a broken wrist
by smashing the opposite thumb with a hammer.
Pain is a complex issue,
but not for opponents in video games,
not for puppets,
and not for characters in cartoons.
Subject of many dental procedures, due to pain-free dentistry,
I have become focused on the needle that delivers the novocaine.
Anesthetics preceded antiseptics, which were not established until after
1854 when John Snow showed that cholera was carried by contaminated water, and
after 1860, when Louis Pasteur pointed out that micro-organisms were responsible for infections.
Subject of many dental procedures, due to pain-free dentistry, I have become focused on the needle that delivers the novocaine.
Anesthetics preceded antiseptics, which were not established until after 1854 when John Snow showed that cholera was carried by contaminated water, and after 1860, when Louis Pasteur pointed out that micro-organisms were responsible for infections.
See also in The book of science:
Readings on wikipedia: