General Anesthesia Within the History of Civilization

Like many careers and practices, general anesthesia came about to solve a problem. This is a universal problem that becomes an extreme issue when someone cuts into your bones. Pain is this problem, and anesthesia is the solution.

Medicine, in its many forms, has been around almost as long as recorded history tells us. All the way back to 4000 BC, the Babylonian people used Opium as anesthetic. This remained a popular method for thousands of years, and also started the trend of finding plants to relieve pain. Among these were mandrake, henbane, hemlock, wine, coca leaves, and vegetable ash.

"At the Oracle of Delphi, Apollo's Pythian priestesses utter prophecies after breathing in fumes emanating from geologic faultlines beneath the Temple to Apollo. One of the inhaled gases may have been ethylene, an inhalational anesthetic which will be popular clinically by the mid-1920s AD"

By the 1600s ether became popular, and other methods paved the way for more modern techniques such as intravenous therapy. As time went on, doctors and pharmacists refined these practices, finding a more specific gas, nitros oxide, and isolating the substance morphine from opium.

The 1800s were full of experimentation and exploration. Cocaine, nitros oxide mixed with oxygen, intravenous and spinal anesthetic all were popularized in these years. Most of these practices started being tested on animals, then the doctors would test it on themselves. In the case of chloroform, it was originally used for pain in childbirth, controlled by drip bottles.

The first half of the 20th century brought about improvements in medical tools and control of substances. The second half of the century was when numerous gases and intravenous anesthetic were discovered, a lot of which are still used today.

Talking to doctors and nurses, I have gotten an overall feeling that the game is changing a little bit. Doctors are liable for so much that all they do is paperwork now. There is so much technology that can tell us more than we thought imaginable just a few years ago. This allows physicians to be very specialized. Talking to a nurse anesthetist was the reason why I want to become one. The anesthesiologist has more liability and just tells the CRNA (nurse anesthetist) what to do. Technology and the way the government sets up healthcare will determine where this profession goes in the future.

http://www.woodlibrarymuseum.org/history-of-anesthesia/