Snow - Blessed days of anaesthesia: how anaesthetics changed the world

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Stephanie Snow, 2008

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ISBN 978-0-19-280586-7

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is a further fruit of a project generously supported by a Research Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine, undertaken at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. Many institutions have provided invaluable help over the years and I particularly thank staff of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the British Medical Association, the Royal Society of Medicine, St Georges Hospital, St Bartholomews Hospital, Kings College Hospital, the London Hospital, the Royal Free Hospital, the London Metropolitan Archives, Westminster Medical Society, Edinburgh Public Record Office, Glaxo Wellcome, the History of Anaesthesia Society, the John Rylands University Library, and the Liverpool Medical Institute. Sources that I particularly drew on in the preparation of this book are mentioned in Further Reading but I am in debt to many more historians of medicine and other scholars whose work and ideas have sustained my own. I am particularly grateful to Lucy Bending for discussions on ideas of pain in the nineteenth century; Peter Drury for advice on aspects of twentieth-century anaesthesia; Charles Suckling for sharing his memories of the discovery of halothane; and David Watts for giving permission to reprint his poem Starting the IV: Anesthesia. My thanks to those who have read parts, or all of this book, and whose thoughts and helpful criticisms have improved its clarity and accuracy: Emm Barnes, Peter Drury, John Pickstone, Charles Suckling, and Meriel Underwood. Special thanks go to Emm Barnes for timely and sustaining support. I am grateful to my editors at Oxford University Press: Marsha Filion, whose enthusiasm for the project started the ball rolling; and Latha Menon and James Thompson, whose well-judged nudges kept it going. Finally, but most importantly, I thank my family, especially Evie, Verity, and Gwyn, who have tolerated the writing process with cheerful forbearance.

Stephanie J. Snow

Erway Hall

December 2007

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

Pain is a universal experience. Few readers of these pages can have escaped the discomfort of headaches, toothaches, or indeed the debilitating pain of chronic conditions such as arthritis or backache. In the Western world we have easy access to a wide range of analgesics and anaesthetics. Some conditions remain impervious to treatment but most sufferers will find relief of some sort. Certainly no patient will have to undergo a surgical operation without anaesthesia, nor women face childbirth without the option of pain relief. Medical schools teach students that alleviating physical pain is central to all specialties and there is an enormous amount of evidencebased literature which shows the benefits of different therapies.

Our understandings of pain are very different to those which dominated medicine before the introduction of anaesthesia in the 1840s. Then, although practitioners had always sought to alleviate suffering, pain was widely thought to be of physiological and moral value. In surgery, pain was the stimulant that preserved life in the body during the stress of an operation. Understandings of pain had begun to change in the eighteenth century, but the pain of operations seemed intransigent until the discovery of anaesthesia. We might imagine that soon after William Morton demonstrated the anaesthetic properties of ether in Massachusetts General Hospital in October 1846, every patient subsequently undergoing an operation received pain relief. But this was not so: the introduction of anaesthesia was controversial. In Britain, from December 1846 until at least the 1860s, anaesthesia was a selective practice: many patients continued to endure pain and suffering during operations.