1842-1846

Anesthesia

• 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.