Anaesthesia
Surgery stops being an ordeal endured while conscious.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Ether is demonstrated publicly at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 and chloroform follows within a year. Before this, speed was the surgeon's principal virtue and operations were limited to what a person could survive being awake for. Anaesthesia and antisepsis together make internal surgery possible. Its adoption for childbirth was resisted on the grounds that pain there was ordained, until Queen Victoria used it in 1853.