“…and [Adam] slept: and [God] took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof.”
Genesis 2:21
Many breakthroughs made in modern medicine, such as open heart surgery or joint replacements, would never have been possible in a world without pain control. But how did anesthesia develop?
As it turns out, early physicians never, to the best of our knowledge, resorted to knocking people out prior to performing surgery. Ancient Egyptian and Assyrian physicians compressed both carotid arteries at the same time, limiting blood flow to the brain and so inducing loss of consciousness in patients for the purpose of conducting a procedure. In addition, the Egyptians discovered that opium could help to ease pain, and the Assyrians used their own painkilling mixtures of belladonna, cannabis, and mandrake root. The Greeks and Romans copied and developed these techniques, and medieval Arabs even developed a form of inhalational anesthesia.
The advent of modern anesthesia can be traced to the latter half of the eighteenth century, when Joseph Priestley isolated nitrous oxide. Sir Humphrey Davy realized that it had anesthetic and soporific qualities, but it was considered more of an amusing way to pass the afternoon than a medical breakthrough. All that changed when a U.S. dentist started using it to perform dental extractions painlessly. A few years later, diethyl ether became the anesthetic drug of choice, first for dental procedures, and subsequently for other operations. Chloroform, which had the benefit of being less flammable, but the caveat of being much more likely to cause complications, was used in lieu of ether in some areas.
