Anesthesia Was Invented after a Laughing Gas Party
Before modern anesthesia, surgery was an agonizing experience. Procedures were done quickly and often with alcohol, opium, or nothing at all. That began to change in 1799, when 20-year-old English chemist Humphry Davy started experimenting with nitrous oxide—better known as laughing gas. Davy didn’t experiment alone. He invited friends to inhale the gas during get-togethers in the drawing room above his laboratory. The effects were immediate: laughter, euphoria, and shifts in bodily sensation all around. Davy recorded these findings and published them in 1800. These parties caught on across the U.K. and the United States, where ether was favored over laughing gas (the effects were similar and it was easier to obtain). Decades later, in 1844, American dentist Horace Wells decided to try nitrous oxide as an anesthetic for a tooth extraction. Though his early attempts weren’t successful, he inspired a colleague to attempt a similar procedure using ether. In 1846, dentist William Morton successfully demonstrated using ether as an anesthetic, ushering in the first widely accepted form of modern anesthesia.
The first local anesthetic was cocaine.
By the 1880s, anesthetics had already started transforming surgery, but pain control was still limited. In 1884, Austrian ophthalmologist Carl Koller demonstrated that a cocaine solution could numb the surface of the eye, allowing surgery to be performed without pain, and without putting a patient fully to sleep. Cocaine became widely used in medical procedures in the U.S. and Europe. But by 1886, cocaine’s toxicity was coming under fire, with concerns of complications and addiction. At the end of the 19th century, advances in organic chemistry led to safer synthetic alternatives. Early compounds such as procaine helped reduce reliance on cocaine, followed by a wave of new local anesthetics in the early 20th century.
Source: historyfacts.com, Nicole Villeneuve
Contributed by Jane Hart