However, Thomas Beddoes (once Black’s student) was different, establishing a Pneumatic Institute near Bristol in 1798 to allow objective studies, and appointing the young Humphrey Davy to perform them.ĭavy’s ‘ Researches, Chemical and Philosophical: Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide’, published in 1799, describes two major effects of its inhalation: euphoria (he coined the term ‘laughing gas’) and analgesia (it eased the pain of his erupting wisdom tooth). As with other scientific developments, the therapeutic possibilities were explored and ‘pneumatic medicine’ was born, although many of its practitioners were charlatans happy to defraud a gullible public. It was during the Enlightenment that the gases carbon dioxide (Joseph Black, 1754), oxygen (Joseph Priestley, 1771), and nitrous oxide (Priestly again, 1772) were discovered. There are early reports of it producing both pain relief and loss of consciousness, but such observations were not applied clinically for centuries - examples of a recurring theme: clinical use of the effect did not follow until long after its original observation.
However, di-ethyl ether, the first agent to be demonstrated successfully in public, was originally synthesized (by the action of sulphuric acid on ethanol) in the thirteenth century. It stems from discoveries made in Britain during the latter half of the 18 th century, the time of the ‘Enlightenment’. Although a number of drugs used in modern anaesthesia have their origins in substances found in plants those early concoctions are irrelevant to the development of effective, drug-induced anaesthesia. opium) are indigenous, but one called ‘Dwale’ appears in medieval English texts. Most of the herbal mixtures were devised in Southern Europe or the Orient where plants with active alkaloids (e.g. Hypnotism, introduced as ‘animal magnetism’ or ‘Mesmerism’ in the latter part of the eighteenth century (depicted above), can be effective in susceptible individuals, but such people are relatively rare in developed societies.
These methods were impossible to quantify, and the best that can be said of many is that they were harmlessly ineffective, but that is obviously not the case with head trauma or obstructing the flow of blood to the brain. Most involved ingestion of ethanol and or herbal mixtures, but ‘knock-out’ blows to the head and bilateral carotid artery compression (carotid derives from the Greek for stupor) are also described. Shakespeare’s observation (from Cymbeline) explains why attempts to alleviate the pain of disease, injury or simple surgical procedures by producing unconsciousness are almost as old as civilization, although the techniques were crude.
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