THE REVOLUTIONARY DISCOVERY OF ANAESTHETICS

modified. Before surgery involved some interactions between the patient and the surgeon but because of the anaesthesia this became impossible. More importantly, there was no significant difference between surgeries that used anaesthesia and surgery without.

Ashley Lee (WHS)

As individuals living in 21st century, it is very hard to imagine what people’s lives were like hundreds of years ago. Even trying to picture what it was like before the development of internet is challenging. Out of many revolutionary discoveries made by humankind that changed the way of life, I wish to highlight the discovery of anaesthetics.

1 A picture of Thomas Dent Mütter: https://artsandculture.google. com/entity/dr-thomas-dent-mutter/g11jg837s4m

efore discovering anaesthetics, surgeries were carried out on patients who were wide awake. The concept of anaesthesia was not very well known so it was normal for surgery to take place without any numbing of pain. Some early medical records state that the patients had to be strapped to the bed or be held by people whose job was to stop the patient from moving while surgery was taking place. Despite this, surgeries still continued. Thomas Dent Mütter, a doctor during 1800s, specialised in reconstructive surgeries on people with severe deformities without anaesthesia. As an early surgeon, he put in a lot of effort to minimise the pain felt by patients during surgeries. This included massaging the patient before surgery to desensitise them to his touches and trying to increase the speed of his hands during surgeries to shorten the length of suffering for the patient.

First ever surgery using anaesthetics happened in Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston by dentist William T.G. Morton and surgeon John Warren in 1846. Then a month later, Dr Mütter performed Philadelphia’s first ether anaesthesia surgery successfully. You might think the discovery and use of anaesthesia was nice and neat. However, use of anaesthesia was banned after a few weeks in several hospitals after successful demonstrations. This is because previous concept of surgery was being

2 The first surgery using ether anaesthesia: https://www. massmoments.org/moment-details/boston-dentist-demonstratesether.html

Use of anaesthesia introduced new problems to surgeries. The effective dose of anaesthetics was unknown so it would often fail to work or it would result in an overdose which increased table deaths (patient dying on the surgical table). In addition, doctors then did not believe in germ theory of diseases which is a theory that explains causation of diseases from pathogens(germs). This meant that doctors did not wash their hands nor sanitise the medical instruments. This led to many patients dying even after a very successful surgery as a result of infections. So when did medics actually start performing surgeries resembling today’s procedures? Towards 1900s, doctors started to believe in germ theory of diseases (over 300 years after its first proposal). From then, surgeries were performed in sterilised environment with sterilised equipment which significantly lowered the number of deaths after surgery. Also new legislations have been put in place regarding doses of anaesthesia which provided clear guidelines for doctors to follow for safe and effective use of anaesthetics. As a student hoping to become a dentist, the discovery of anaesthetics is truly revolutionary. Dentistry involves lots of surgical procedures and so without anaesthetics surgery would have been much more painful for both patient and dentist. Moreover, without the aid of anaesthetics, development of more complex procedures could not have been possible.

Bibliography

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz (2014) Surgery in a Time Before Anaesthesia (Op-Ed), Live science, available at: https://www.livescience.com/48003-anesthesia-wasonce-devils-work.html (accessed on 2nd April 2021)

Scott Harrah (2015) Medical Milestones: Discovery of Anesthesia & Timeline, UMHS, available at: https:// www.umhs-sk.org/blog/medical-milestones-discoveryanesthesia-timeline (accessed on 2nd April 2021)

Germ theory of diseases, Wikipedia, available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_ disease (accessed on 2nd April 2021)