In addition to limitations in technical knowledge, cultural attitudes toward pain are often cited as reasons humans endured centuries of surgery without effective anesthesia.
- Early Analgesics and Soporifics (Table 1-1: Early Analgesics and Soporifics)
- Almost Discovery: Clarke, Long, and Wells
- In January 1842, William E. Clarke, a medical student, may have given the first ether anesthetic in Rochester, NY, for a dental extraction.
- Crawford Williamson Long administered ether for surgical anesthesia to James M. Venable on March 30, 1842, in Jefferson, GA, for the removal of a tumor on his neck. Long did not report his success until 1849 when ether anesthesia was already well known.
- Horace Wells observed the “analgesic effects” of nitrous oxide when he attended a lecture exhibition by an itinerant “scientist,” Gardner Quincy Colton. A few weeks later, in January 1845, Wells attempted a public demonstration in Boston at the Harvard Medical School, but the experience was judged a failure.
- Public Demonstration of Ether Anesthesia. William Thomas Morton Green was responsible for the first successful public demonstration of ether anesthesia. This demonstration, which took place in the Bullfinch Amphitheater of the Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846, is memorialized by the surgeon's statement to his audience at the end of the procedure: “Gentlemen, this is no humbug.”
- Chloroform and Obstetrics
- James Young Simpson, a successful obstetrician of Edinburgh, Scotland, was among the first to use ether for the pain relief in obstetrics. He became dissatisfied with ether and encouraged the use of chloroform.
- Queen Victoria's endorsement of obstetric anesthesia resulted in acceptance of the use of anesthesia in labor.
- John Snow took an interest in anesthetic practice soon after the news of ether anesthesia reached England in December 1846. Snow developed a mask that closely resembles a modern facemask and introduced a chloroform inhaler.