The History of Anesthesia

Before the 1840s, surgery was performed on conscious patients restrained by assistants, with opium, alcohol, and mandrake offering only partial relief. In the early 1840s, practitioners of "mesmerism" reported surgical pain relief through hypnotic techniques — results widely debated and often dismissed by the medical establishment, but demonstrating real demand for painless surgery.

Boston dentist William T. G. Morton administered diethyl ether to patient Edward Gilbert Abbott while surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumor from his neck at Massachusetts General Hospital. The demonstration — imperfect but successful enough to prove the principle — spread worldwide within months and is commemorated as "Ether Day."

Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Physician Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested the word "anesthesia" for the new technique. Within weeks, competing claims of discovery emerged: Georgia surgeon Crawford Long had used ether in operations as early as 1842 without publishing, and dentist Horace Wells had failed with nitrous oxide in a public demonstration weeks before Morton's success. Morton's attempts to patent the agent drew criticism, and the priority dispute ran for decades.

Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA

News of the Boston demonstration reached London within weeks, and surgeon Robert Liston performed the first ether-assisted amputation in Europe at University College Hospital, reportedly remarking, "This Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow." Ether anesthesia was adopted in Britain, France, and Germany almost immediately.

Location: London, England

Ether and chloroform were used by United States Army surgeons during the Mexican-American War and extensively during the Crimean War, where anesthetics became routine in field and hospital surgery. Wartime adoption accelerated the global diffusion of the technique far faster than peacetime practice alone would have.

Edinburgh obstetrician James Young Simpson administered chloroform — a sweeter-smelling, faster-acting agent than ether — for pain relief in childbirth, the first use on a human. He faced opposition from physicians and clergy who argued that pain in labor was natural or divinely ordained; Simpson publicly contested both grounds.

Location: Edinburgh, Scotland

John Snow administered chloroform to Queen Victoria for the birth of Prince Leopold. The royal endorsement is widely credited with legitimizing obstetric anesthesia against remaining religious and medical opposition, and with popularizing the practice among the public.

Location: London, England

Reports of sudden death under chloroform accumulated through the second half of the nineteenth century, prompting formal investigation by commissions in Britain and India. The findings shaped safer dosing practices and drove the search for less toxic inhalational agents that continued into the twentieth century.

Location: London, England

After Carl Koller demonstrated cocaine's use as a local anesthetic for eye surgery in 1884, August Bier performed the first spinal anesthesia in Kiel, injecting cocaine into the cerebrospinal fluid to numb the lower body. Regional techniques allowed surgery on patients who could not tolerate general anesthesia and seeded modern pain medicine.

Location: Kiel, Germany

The introduction of thiopental (sodium pentothal) in 1934 gave anesthesia its first reliable intravenous induction agent, shortening the distressing experience of inhalational induction. In 1942, Harold Griffith and Enid Johnson used curare-derived tubocurarine in Montreal as a muscle relaxant, separating relaxation from unconsciousness and transforming surgical technique.

Halothane, introduced in 1956, became the first in a generation of non-flammable, clinically safer inhalational agents, replacing ether and chloroform in routine practice. Combined with dedicated anesthesiology training and monitoring standards, it opened the era in which anesthesia evolved from an art into a medical specialty.

The adoption of pulse oximetry and capnography in the 1980s, alongside the propofol intravenous agent and the laryngeal mask airway, closed the monitoring gaps behind most historical anesthetic deaths. By the end of the twentieth century, anesthesia-related mortality had fallen to roughly one death per 100,000-200,000 anesthetics in developed systems — a transformation in patient safety with few parallels in medicine.